Critical miscellanies

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CRITICAL MISCELLANIES

SEE"

CRITICAL

MISCELLANIES

BY

JOHN MORLEY

VOL. I.

0

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1908

\V

)

9 If

57/

/./

77tw Edition first printed 1886
Reprinted 1888, 1893, 1898, 1904, 15

NOTE.

Nearly the whole of The contents of the present
volumes have already appeared in the pages of the
Fortnightly Review. The Essays have all heen sub-
mitted to revision, and some of them have been
enlarged.

June 9, 1877.

V i

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

ROBESPIERRE.

v»»

I.

Introduction ......

Different views of Robespierre .

His youthful history ....

An advocate at Arras ....

Acquaintance with Carnot

The summoning of the States-General

Prophecies of revolution ....

Reforming Ministers tried and dismissed

Financial state of France

Impotence of the Monarchy

The Constituent Assembly

Robespierre interprets the revolutionary moven

The Sixth of October 1789 . ...

Alteration in Robespierre's position
Character of Louis xvi. ....

And of Marie Antoinette

The Constitution and Robespierre's mark upoi

Instability of the new arrangements

ent r

ghtly

PACE
1
4

5
7
10
11
12
13
14
17
19
•21
23
25
28
29
34
37

viii CONTENTS.

PAGE

Importance of Jacobin ascendancy ...... 41

The Legislative Assembly ...... 42

Robespierre's power at the Jacobin Club . . ,41

His oratory . . . . . , . .45

The true secret of his popularity ..... 48
Aggravation of the crisis in the spring of 1792 . . 50

The Tenth of August 1792 52

Danton ...... .... 53

Compared with Robespierre ...... 55

Robespierre compared with Marat and with Sieyes . . 57.
Character of the Terror ....... 58

II.

Fall of the Girondins indispensable . . . . .60

France in desperate peril ...... 61

The Committee of Public Safety ..... 65

At the Tuileries ........ 67

The contending factions ....... 70

Reproduced an older conflict of theories .... 72

Robespierre's attitude ....... 73

The Hebertists 77

Chaumette and his fundamental error . . .80

Robespierre and the atheists . . . . . t. . 82

His bitterness towards Anacharsis Clootz ... 86

New turn of events (March 1794) ..... 90

First breach in the Jacobin ranks : the Hebertists . . 90

Robespierre's abandonment of Danton .... 91

Second breach : the Dantonians (April 1794) ... 95

Another reminiscence of this date ..... 97

Robespierre's relations to the Committees changed . . 98

The Feast of the Supreme Being ..... 101

Its false philosophy 103

CONTENTS.

And political inanity ......

The Law of Prairial ......

Robespierre's motive in devising it .

It produces the Great Terror .....

.^Robespierre's chagrin at its miscarriage .
His responsibility not to be denied ....

(1) Affair of Catherine Theot ....

,, Cecile Renault .....

(2) Robespierre stimulated popular commissions .
VlTte drama of Thermidor : the combatants

Its conditions

The Eighth Thermidor

Inefficiency of Robespierre's speech ....

The Ninth Thermidor

Famous scene in the Convention ....

Robespierre a prisoner ......

Struggle between the Convention and the Commune
Death of Robespierre ......

Ultimate issue of the struggle between the Committees
and the Convention .......

IX

I'AGE

104
106
107
109
112
112
113
114
115
117
118
119
121
123
125
127
129
131

132

CAELYLE.

Mr. Carlyle's influence, and degree of its durability

His literary services .....

No label useful in characterising him

The poetic and the scientific temperaments

Rousseau and Mr. Carlyle ....

The poetic method of handling social questions

Impotent unrest, and his way of treating it

Founded on the purest individualism

Mr. Carlyle's historic position in the European reaction

135

139
142
144
147
149
152
151
157

X CONTENTS.

TAGE

Coleridge 159

Byron 161

Mr. Carlyle's victory over Byronism .... 163

Goethe 164

.Air. Carlyle's intensely practical turn, though veiled . 166

His identification of material with moral order . . 169
And acceptance of the doctrine that the end justifies the

means ......... 170

Two sets of relations still regulated by pathological prin-
ciple 172

Defect in Mr. Carlyle's discussion of them . . .174
His reticences . . . . . . . .176

Equally hostile to metaphysics and to the extreme preten-
sions of the physicist . . . . . .177

Natural Supernaturalism, and the measure of its truth . 179
Two qualities flowing from his peculiar fatalism : —

(1) Contempt for excess of moral nicety . . . 182

(2) Defect of sympathy with masses of men . . .186
Perils in his constant sense of the nothingness of life . 188
Hero-worship, and its inadequateness . . . .189
Theories of the dissolution of the old European order . 193
Mr. Carlyle's view of the French Revolution . . . 195
Of the Reformation and Protestantism . . . .197
Inability to understand the political point of view . .199"

BYRON

Byron's influence in Europe ...... 203

In England 204

Criticism not concerned with Byron's private life . . 208

Function of synthetic criticism ..... 210

Byron has the political quality of Milton and Shakespeare 212

CONTENTS.

Contrasted with Shelley in this respect .
Peculiarity of the revolutionary view of nature
Revolutionary sentimentalism ....

And revolutionary commonplace in Byron

Byron's reasonableness ......

Size and difficulties of his subject ....

His mastery of it .

The reflection of Danton in Byron ....

The reactionary influence upon him

Origin of his apparent cynicism ....

His want of positive knowledge ....

^Esthetic and emotional relations to intellectual positivity

Significance of his dramatic predilections

His idea of nature less hurtful in art than in politics

Its influence upon his views of duty and domestic sentiment

His public career better than one side of his creed .

Absence of true subjective melancholy from his nature

His ethical poverty ......

Conclusion ........

MACAULAY.

The Life of Macaulay ......

Macaulay's vast popularity .....

He and Mill, the two masters of the modern journalist
His marked quality ......

Set his stamp on style ......

His genius for narration ......

His copiousness of illustration ....

Macaulay's, the style of literary knowledge

His use of generous commonplace ....

Perfect accord with his audience ....

xil CONTENTS.

PACE

Dislike of analysis . ...... 272

Not meditative .....

273

Macaulay's is the prose of spoken deliverance

%

276

Character of his geniality

278

Metallic hardness and brightness

279

Compared with Carlyle ....

281

Harsh modulations and shallow cadences

283

Compared with Burke ....

283

Or with Southey .....

285

Faults of intellectual conscience

286

Vulgarity of thought ....

289

Conclusion ......

290

EMERSON.

Introductory .

293

296

Takes charge of an Unitarian Churc

h in Boston (1829)

297

Resigns the charge in 1S32

298

Goes to Europe (1833) .

299

Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyh

300

Settles in Concord (1834)

301

Description of Concord by Clough .

301

Death of his first wife

302

303

305

Thorcau .....

305

Views on Solitude .

306

Effect of his address in the Divinity School of Harvarc

[

(1838)- .

307

CONTENTS. Xlil

PAGE

Contributes to the Dial (1840) 309

First series of his Essays published in, 1841 . . . 310

Second series three years later . . . . .310

Second visit to England (1847), and delivers lectures on

'Representative Men,' collected and published in 1850 310
Poems first collected in 1847 ; final version made in 1876. 310
Essays and Lectures published in 1860, under general title

of The Conduct of Life . . . . . .310

And the Civil War . . 310

General retrospect of his life ...... 312

Died April 27, 1882 312

II.

Style of his writings

313

Manner as a lecturer

314

Dr. Holmes .

314

His use of words

314

Sincerity

316

And Landor .

316

Mr. Lowell .

316

Description of his library

317

A word or two about his verse

j

319

III.

Hawthorne ........

. 322

And Carlyle

323

The friends of Universal Progress in 1840

. 323

Bossuet ... ......

. 324

Remarks on New England

. 325

One of the few moral reformers ....

. 327

XIV

CONTENTS.
Life,' on 'Behaviour

Essays on 'Domesti

'Manners' .....

Compared to Franklin and Chesterfield .
Is for faith before works ....
A systematic reason er ....
The Emersonian faith abundantly justified
Carlyle's letter to (June 4, 1871)
One remarkable result of his idealism
On Death and Sin .....
Conclusion ......

and

329
330
333
335
337
337
341
342, 344
. 346

ROBESPIERRE.

A FRENCH writer has recently published a careful and
interesting volume on the famous events which ended
in the overthrow of Robespierre and the close of the
Reign of Terror.1 These events are known in the
historic calendar as the Revolution of Thermidor in
the Year II. After the fall of the monarchy, the
Convention decided that the year should begin with
the autumnal equinox, and that the enumeration
should date from the birth of the Republic. The
Year I. opens on September 22, 1792; the Year II.
opens on the same day of 1 793. The month of Ther-
midor begins on July 19. The memorable Ninth
Thermidor therefore corresponds to July 27. 1794.
This has commonly been taken as the date of the
commencement of a counter-revolution, and in one
sense it was so. Comte, however, and others have
preferred to fix the reaction at the execution of
Danton (April 5, 1794), or Robespierre's official

1 La Revolution de Thermidor. Par Ch. D'Herieault. Paris:
Didier, 1876.

VOL. I. %> B

2 ROBESPIERRE.

proclamation of Deism in the Festival of the Supreme
Being (May 7, 1794).

M. D'Hericault does not belong to the school of
writers who treat the course of history as a great high
road, following a (irmly traced line, and set with plain
and ineffaceable landmarks. The French Revolution
has nearly always been handled in this way, alike by
those who think it fruitful i» blessings, and by their
adversaries, who pronounce it a curse inflicted by the
wrath of Heaven. Historians have looked at the
Revolution as a plain landsman looks at the sea. To
the landsman the ocean seems one huge immeasurable
flood, obeying a simple law of ebb and flow, and offering
to the navigator a single uniform force. Yet in truth
we know that the oceanic movement is the product
of many forces ; the seeming uniformity covers the
energy of a hundred currents and counter-currents ;
the sea-floor is not even nor the same, but is subject
to untold conditions of elevation and subsidence ; the
sea is not one mass, but many masses moving along
definite lines of their own. It is the same with the
great tides of history. Wise men shrink from sum-
ming them up in single propositions. That the
French Revolution led to an immense augmentation
of happiness, both for the French and for mankind,
can only be denied by the Pope. That it secured its
beneficent results untempcred by any mixture of evil,
can only be maintained by men as mad as Doctor
Pangloss. The Greek poetess Corinna said to the
youthful Pindar, when he had interwoven all the gods

ROBESPIERRE. 6

and goddesses in the Theban mythology into a single
hymn, that we should sow with the hand and not
with the sack. Corinna's monition to the singer is
proper to the interpreter of historical truth : he should
cull with the hand, and not sweep in with the scythe.
It is doubtless mere pedantry to abstain from the
widest conception of the sum of a great movement.
A clear, definite, and stable idea of the meaning in
the history of human progress of such vast groups of
events as the Eeformation or the Eevolution, is indis-
pensable for any one to whom history is a serious
study of society. It is just as important, however,
not to forget that they were really groups of events,
and not in either case a single uniform movement.
The World-Epos is after all only a file of the morning
paper in a state of glorification. A sensible man
learns, in everyday life, to abstain from praising and
blaming character by wholesale ; he becomes content
to say of this trait that it is good, and of that act
that it was bad. So in history, we become unwilling
to join or to admire those who insist upon transferring
their sentiment upon the whole to their judgment
upon each part. We seek to be allowed to retain a
decided opinion as to the final value to mankind of a
long series of transactions, and yet not to commit
ourselves to set the same estimate on each transaction
in particular, still less on each person associated with
it. Why shall we not prize the general results of the
Eeformation, without being obliged to defend John
of Leyden and the Munster Anabaptists ?

4 ROBESPIERRE.

M. D'H6ricault's volume naturally suggests such
reflections as these. Of all the men of the Revolution,
Robespierre has suffered most from the audacious
idolatry of some writers, and the splenetic impatience
of others. M. Louis Blanc and M. Ernest Hamel talk
of him as an angel or a prophet, and the Ninth Ther-
midor is a red day indeed in their martyrology.
Michelet and M. D'H6ricault treat him as a mixture
of Cagliostro and Caligula, both a charlatan and a
miscreant. We are reminded of the commencement
of an address of the French Senate to the first Bona-
parte : 'Sire,' they began, 'the desire for perfection
is one of the worst maladies that can afflict the human
mind.' This bold aphorism touches one of the roots
of the judgments we pass both upon men and events.
It is because people so irrationally think fit to insist
upon perfection, that Robespierre's admirers would
fain deny that he ever had a fault, and the tacit
adoption of the same impracticable standard makes it
easier for Robespierre's wholesale detractors to deny
that he had a single virtue or performed a single
service. The point of view is essentially , unfit for
history. The real subject of history is the improve-
ment of social arrangements, and no conspicuous actor
in public affairs since the world began saw the true
direction of improvement with an absolutely unerring
eye from the beginning of his career to the end. It
is folly for the historian, as it is for the statesman, to
strain after the imaginative unity of the dramatic
creator. Social progress is an affair of many small

ROBESPIERRE. 5

pieces and slow accretions, and the interest of historic
study lies in tracing, amid the immense turmoil of
events and through the confusion of voices, the devious
course of the sacred torch, as it shifts from bearer to
bearer. And it is not the bearers who are most
interesting, but the torch.

In the old Flemish town of Arras, known in the
diplomatic history of the fifteenth century by a couple
of important treaties, and famous in the industrial
history of the Middle Ages for its pre-eminence in
the manufacture of the most splendid kind of tapestry
hangings, Maximilian Robespierre was born in May
1758. He was therefore no more than five and thirty
years old when he came to his ghastly end in 1794.
His father was a lawyer, and, though the surname of
the family had the prefix of nobility, they belonged
to the middle class. When this decorative prefix
became dangerous, Maximilian Derobespierre dropped
it. His great rival, Danton, was less prudent or
less fortunate, and one of the charges made against
him was that he had styled himself Monsieur
D' Anton.

Robespierre's youth was embittered by sharp mis-
fortune. His mother died when he was only seven
years old, and his father had so little courage under
the blow that he threw up his practice, deserted his
children, and died in purposeless wanderings through
Germany. The burden that the weak and selfish
throw down, must be taken up by the brave. Friendly

6 KOHESPIERKE.

kinsfolk charged themselves with the maintenance of
the four orphans. Maximilian was sent to the school
of the town, whence he proceeded with a sizarship to
the college of Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He was an
apt and studious pupil, but austere, and disposed to
that sombre cast of spirits which is common enough
where a lad of some sensibility and much self-esteem
finds himself stamped with a badge of social inferiority.
Robespierre's worshippers love to dwell on his fond-
ness for birds : with the universal passion of mankind
for legends of the saints, they tell how the untimely
death of a favourite pigeon afflicted him with anguish
so poignant, that, even sixty long years after, it made
his sister's heart ache to look back upon the pain
of that tragic moment. Always a sentimentalist,
Robespierre was from boyhood a devout enthusiast
for the great high priest of the sentimental tribe.
Rousseau was then passing the last squalid days of
his life among the meadows and woods at Ermenon-
ville. Robespierre, who could not have been more
than twenty at the time, for Rousseau died in the
slimmer of 1778, is said to have gone on a reverential
pilgrimage in search of an oracle from the*lonely
sage, as Boswell and as Gibbon and a hundred others
had gone before him. Rousseau was wont to use his
real adorers as ill as he used his imaginary enemies.
Robespierre may well have shared the discouragement
of the enthusiastic father who informed Rousseau that
he was about to bring up his son on the principles of
Emilvus. 'Then so much the worse,' cried the per-

ROBESPIERRE. 7

verse philosopher, 'both for you and your son.' If
he had been endowed with second sight, he would
have thought at least as rude a presage due to this
last and most ill-starred of a whole generation of
neophytes.

In 1781 Robespierre returned to Arras, and amid
the welcome of his relatives and the good hopes of
friends began the practice of an advocate. For eight
years he led an active and seemly life. 'He was not
wholly pure from that indiscretion of the young
appetite, about which the world is mute, but whose
better ordering and governance would give a diviner
brightness to the earth. Still, if he did not escape
the ordeal of youth, Robespierre was frugal, laborious,
and persevering. His domestic amiability made him
the delight of his sister, and his zealous self-sacrifice
for the education and advancement in life of his
younger brother was afterwards repaid by Augustin
Robespierre's devotion through all the fierce and
horrible hours of Thermidor. Though cold in tempera-
ment, extremely reserved in manners, and fond of
industrious seclusion, Robespierre did not disdain the
social diversions of the town. He was a member of
a reunion of Rosati, who sang madrigals and admired
one another's bad verses. Those who love the ironical
surprises of fate, may picture the young man who was
doomed to play so terrible a part in terrible affairs,
goina; through the harmless follies of a ceremonial
reception by the Rosati, taking three deep breaths
over a rose, solemnly fastening the emblem to his

8 ROBESPIERRE.

coat, emptying a glass of rose-red wine at a draught

to the good health of the company, and finally recit-
ing couplets that Voltaire -would have found almost
as detestable as the Law of Prairial or the Festival of
the Supreme Being. More laudable efforts of ambi-
tion were prize essays, in which Kobespierre has the
merit of taking the right side in important questions.
He protested against the inhumanity of laws that
inflicted civil infamy upon the innocent family of a
convicted criminal. And he protested against the
still more horrid cruelty which reduced unfortunate
children born out of wedlock to something like the
status of the mediaeval serf. Robespierre's composi-
tions at this time do not rise above the ordinary level
of declaiming mediocrity, but they promised a man-
hood of benignity and enlightenment. To compose
prize essays on political reforms was better than to
ignore or to oppose political reform. But the course
of events afterwards owed their least desirable bias
to the fact that such compositions were the nearest
approach to political training that so many of the
revolutionary leaders underwent. One is inplined to
apply to practical politics Arthur Young's sensible
remark about the endeavour of the French to improve
the quality of their wool : ' A cultivator at the head
of a sheep-farm of 3000 or 4000 acres, would in a few-
years do more for their wools than all the academicians
and philosophers will effect in ten centuries.'

In his profession he distinguished himself in one
or two causes of local celebrity. An innovating

ROBESPIERRE. V

citizen had been ordered by the authorities to remove
a lisrhtnincr-conductor from his house within three
days, as being a mischievous practical paradox, as
well as a danger and an annoyance to his neighbours.
Robespierre pleaded the innovator's case on appeal,
and won it. He defended a poor woman who had
been wrongfully accused by a monk belonging to the
powerful corporation of a great neighbouring abbey.
The young advocate did not even shrink from man-
fully arguing a case against the august Bishop of
Arras himself. His independence did him no harm.
The Bishop afterwards appointed him to the post of
judge or legal assessor in the episcopal court. This
tribunal was a remnant of what had once been the
sovereign authority and jurisdiction of the Bishops of
Arras. That a court with the power of life and death
should thus exist by the side of a proper corporation
of civil magistrates, is an illustration of the inextric
able labyrinth of the French law and its administration
on the eve of the Revolution. Robespierre did not
hold his office long. Every one has heard the striking
story, how the young judge, whose name was within
half a dozen years to take a place in the popular mind
of France and of Europe with the bloodiest monsters
of myth or history, resigned his post in a fit of remorse
after condemning a murderer to be executed. 'He
is a criminal, no doubt,' Robespierre kept groaning in
reply to the consolations of his sister, for women are
more positive creatures than men : ' a criminal, no
doubt; but to put a man to death!' Many a man

10 ROBESP1ERBE.

thus begins the great voyage with queasy sensibilities,
and ends it a cannibal.

Among Robespierre's associates in. the festive
mummeries of the Rosati was a young officer of En-
gineers, who was destined to be his colleague in the
dread Committee of Public Safety, and to leave an
important name in French history. In the garrison
of Arras, Carnot was quartered, — that iron head,
whose genius for the administrative organisation of
war achieved even greater things for the new republic
than the genius of Louvois had achieved for the old
monarchy. Carnot surpassed not only Louvois, but
perhaps all other names save one in modern military
history, by uniting to the most powerful gifts for
organisation, both the strategic talent that planned
the momentous campaign of 1794, and the splendid
personal energy and skill that prolonged the defence
of Antwerp against the allied army in 1814. Partisans
dream of the unrivalled future of peace, glory, and
freedom that would have fallen to the lot of France,
if only the gods had brought about a hearty union
between the military genius of Carnot and the political
genius of Robespierre. So, no doubt, after the restora-
tion of Charles II. in England, there were good men
who thought that all would have gone very differently,
if only the genius of the great creator of the Ironsides
had taken counsel with the genius of Venner, the Fifth-
Monarchy Man, and Feak, the Anabaptist prophet.

The time was now come when such men as Robes-
pierre were to be tried with fire, when they were to

ROBESPIEKRE. 11

drink the cup of fury and the dregs of the cup of
trembling. Sybils and prophets have already spoken
their inexorable decree, as Goethe has said, on the
day that first gives the man to the world ; no time
and no might can break the stamped mould of his
character ; only as life wears on, do all its aforeshapen
lines come into light. - He is launched into a sea of
external conditions, that are as independent of his
own will as the temperament with which he confronts
them. It is action that tries, and variation of circum-
stance. The leaden chains of use bind many an ugly
unsuspected prisoner in the soul ; and when the habit
of their lives has been sundered, the most immaculate
are capable of antics beyond prevision. A great crisis
of the world was prepared for Robespierre and those
others, his allies or his destroyers, who with hi-",
came like the lightning and went like the wind.

At the end of 1788 the King of France found him-
self forced to summon the States-General. It was
their first assembly since 1614. On the memorable
Fourth of May, 1789, Robespierre appeared at Ver-
sailles as one of the representatives of the third estate
of his native province of Artois. The excitement
and enthusiasm of the elections to this renowned
assembly, the immense demands and boundless ex-
pectations that they disclosed, would have warned a
cool observer of events, if in that heated air a cool
observer could have been found, that the hour had
struck for the fulfilment of those grim apprehensions
of revolution that had risen in the minds of many

12 ROBESPIERRE.

shrewd men, good and bad, in the course of the
previous half century. No great event in history ever
comes wholly unforeseen. The antecedent causes are
so wide-reaching, many, and continuous, that their
direction is always sure to strike the eye of one or
more observers in all its significance. Lewis the
Fifteenth, whose invincible weariness and heavy dis-
gust veiled a penetrating discernment, measured
accurately the scope of the conflict between the crown
and the parlements : but, said he, things as they are
will last my time. Under the roof of his own palace
at Versailles, in the apartment of Madame de Pom-
padour's famous physician, one of Quesnai's economic
disciples had cried out, ' The realm is in a sore way ;
it will never be cured without a great internal com-
motion ; but woe to those who Lave to do with it;
into such work the French go with no slack hand.'
Rousseau, in a passage in the Confessions, not only
divines a speedy convulsion, but with striking practical
sagacity enumerates the political and social causes
that were unavoidably drawing France to the edge of
the abyss. Lord Chesterfield, so different a -man from
Rousseau, declared as early as 1752, that he saw in
France every symptom that history had taught him
to regard as the forerunner of deep change ; before
the end of the century, so his prediction ran, both the
trade of king and the trade of priest in France would
be shorn of half their glory. D'Argenson in the same
year declared a revolution inevitable, and with a
curious precision of anticipation assured himself that

ROBESPIERRE. 13

if once the necessity arose of convoking the States-
General, they would not assemble in vain : qu'on y
•prenne garde I Us seraient fort s6rieux ! Oliver Gold-
smith, idly wandering through France, towards 1755,
discerned in the mutinous attitude of the judicial
corporations, that the genius of freedom was entering
the kingdom in disguise, and that a succession of three
weak monarchs would end in the emancipation of the
people of France. The most touching of all these
presentiments is to be found in a private letter of the
great Empress, the mother of Marie Antoinette her-
self. Maria Theresa describes the ruined state of the
French monarchy, and only prays that if it be doomed
to ruin still more utter, at least the blame may not
fall upon her daughter. The Empress had not learnt
that when the giants of social force are advancing
from the sombre shadow of the past, with the thunder
and the hurricane in their hands, our poor prayers
are of no more avail than the unbodied visions of a
dream.

The old popular assembly of the realm was not
resorted to before every means of dispensing with so
drastic a remedy had been tried. Historians some-
times write as if Turgot were the only able and re-
forming minister of the century. God forbid that we
should put any other minister on a level with that
high and beneficent figure. But Turgot was not the
first statesman, both able and patriotic, who had
been disgraced for want of compliance with the con-
ditions of success at court ; he was only the last of a

14 ROBESPIERRE.

series. Chauvelin, a man of vigour and capacity, was
dismissed with ignominy in 1736. Machault, a re-
former, at once courageous and wise, shared the same
fate twenty years later ; and in his case revolution
was as cruel and as heedless as reaction, for, at the
age of ninety -one, the old man was dragged, hlind
and deaf, before the revolutionary tribunal and thence
despatched to the guillotine. Between Chauvelin and
Machault, the elder D'Argenson, who was greater
than either of them, had been raised to power, and
then speedily hurled down from it (1747), for no
better reason than that his manners were uncouth,
and that he would not waste his time in frivolities
that were as the breath of life in the great gallery
at Versailles and on the smooth -shaven lawns of
Fontainebleau.

Not only had wise counsellors been tried ; con-
sultative assemblies had been tried also. Necker
had been dismissed in 1781, after publishing the
memorable Report which first initiated the nation in
the elements of financial knowledge. The disorder
waxed greater, and the monarchy drew nearer to
bankruptcy each year. The only modern parallel to
the state of things in France under Lewis the Six-
teenth is to be sought in the state of things in Egypt
or in Turkey. Lewis the Fourteenth had left a debt
of between two and three thousand millions of livres,
but this had been wiped out hy the heroic operations
of Law ; operations, by the way, which have never yet
been scientifically criticised. But the debt soon grew

ROBESPIERRE. 15

again, by foolish wars, by the prodigality of the court,
and by the rapacity of the nobles. It amounted in
1789 to something like two hundred and forty millions
sterling ; and it is interesting to notice that this was
exactly the sum of the public debt of Great Britain
at the same time. The year's excess of expenditure
over receipts in 1774 was about fifty millions of
livres : in 1787 it was one hundred and forty millions,
or according to a different computation even two
hundred millions. The material case was not at all
desperate, if only the court had been less infatuated,
and the spirit of the privileged orders had been less
blind and less vile. The fatality of the situation lay
in the characters of a handful of men and women.
For France was abundant in resources, and even at
this moment was far from unprosperous, in spite of
the incredible trammels of law and custom. An able
financier, with the support of a popular chamber and
the assent of the sovereign, could have had no difficulty
in restoring the public credit. But the conditions,
simple as they might seem to a patriot or to pos-
terity, were unattainable so long as power remained
with a caste that were anything we please except
patriots. An Assembly of Notables was brought
together, but it was only the empty phantasm of
national representation. Yet the situation was so
serious that even this body, of arbitrary origin as it
was, still was willing to accept vital reforms. The
privileged order, who were then as their descendants
are now, the worst conservative party in Europe,

1 6 ROBESPIERRE.

immediately persuaded the magisterial corporation to
resist the Notables. The judicial corporation or Par-
lemcnt of Paris had been suppressed under Lewis the
Fifteenth, and unfortunately revived again at the
accession of his grandson. By the inconvenient con-
stitution of the French government, the assent of
that body was indispensable to fiscal legislation, on
the ground that such legislation was part of the
general police of the realm. The king's minister,
now Lomenie de Brienne, devised a new judicial
constitution. But the churchmen, the nobles, and
the lawyers all united in protestations against such
a blow. The common people are not always the best
judges of a remedy for the evils under which they are
the greatest sufferers, and they broke out in disorder
both in Paris and the provinces. They discerned an
attack upon their local independence. Nobody would
accept office in the new courts, and the administration
of justice was at a standstill. A loan was thrown
upon the market, but the public could not be per-
suaded to take it up. It was impossible to collect
the taxes. The interest on the national debt was
unpaid, and the fundholder was dismayed and
exasperated by an announcement that only two-fifths
would be discharged in cash. A very large part of
the national debt was held in the form of annuities
for lives, and men who had invested their savings on
the credit of the government, saw themselves left
without a provision. The total number of fund-
holders cannot be ascertained with any precision, but

ROBESPIERRE. 1 7

it must have been very considerable, especially in Paris
and the other great cities. Add to these all the civil
litigants in the kingdom, who had portions of their
property virtually sequestrated by the suspension of
the courts into which the property had been taken.
The resentment of this immense body of defrauded N
public creditors and injured private suitors explains
the alienation of the middle class from the monarchy.
In the convulsions of our own time, the moneyed
interests have been on one side, and the population
without money on the other. But in the first and
greatest convulsion, those who had nothing to lose
found their animosities shared by those who had had
something to lose, and had lost it.

Deliberative assemblies, then, had been tried, and
ministers had been tried ; both had failed, and there
was no other device left, except one which was
destructive to absolute monarchy. Lewis the Six-
teenth was in 1789 in much the same case as that of
the King of England in 1G40. Charles had done his
best to raise money without any parliament for twelve
years : he had lost patience with the Short Parlia-
ment; finally, he was driven without choice or alter-
native to face as he best could the stout resolution
and the wise patriotism of the Long Parliament.
Men sometimes wonder how it was that Lewis, when
he came to find the National Assembly unmanageable,
and discovering how rapidly he was drifting towards
the thunders of the revolutionary cataract, did not
break up a Chamber over which neither the court,

VOL. I. C

18 ROBESPIERRE.

nor even a minister so popular as Necker. had the
least control. It is a question whether the sword
would not have hroken in his hand. Even supposing,
however, that the army Avould have consented to a
violent movement against the Assembly, the King
would still have been left in the same desperate straits
from which he had looked to the States- General to
extricate him. He might perhaps have dispersed the
Assembly; he could not disperse debt and deficit.
Those monsters would have haunted him as implacably
as ever. There was no new formula of exorcism, nor
any untried enchantment. The success of violent
designs against the National Assembly, had success
been possible, could, after all, have been followed by
no other consummation than the relapse of France
into the raging anarchy of Poland, or the sullen
decrepitude of Turkey.

This will seem to some persons no better than
fatalism. But, in truth, there are two popular ways
of reading the history of events between 1789 and
1794, and each of them seems to us as bad as the
other. According to one, whatever happened in the
Revolution was good and admirable, because it hap-
pened. According to the other, something good and
admirable was always attainable, and, if only bad
men had not interposed, always ready to happen. Of
course, the only sensible view is that many of the
revolutionary solutions were detestable, but no other
solution was within reach. This is undoubtedly the
best of possible worlds ; if the best is not so good as

ROBESPIERRE. 19

we could wish, that is the fault of the possibilities.
Such a doctrine is neither fatalism nor optimism, but
an honest recognition of long chains of cause and
effect in human affairs.

The great gathering of chosen men was first called
States-General ; then it called itself National Assembly;
it is commonly known in history as the Constituent
Assembly. The name is of ironical association, for
the constitution which it framed after much travail
endured for no more than a few months. Its delibera-
tions lasted from May 1789 until September 1791.
Among its members were three principal groups.
There was, first, a band of blind adherents of the old
system of government with all or most of its abuses.
Second, there was a Centre of timid and one-eyed
men, who were for transforming the old absolutist
system into something that should resemble the con-
stitution of our own country. Finally, there was a
Left, with some differences of shade, but all agreeing
in the necessity of a thorough remodelling of every
institution and most of the usages of the country.
' Silence, you thirty votes ! ' cried Mirabeau one day,
when he was interrupted by the dissents of the
Mountain. This was the original measure of the
party that in the twinkling of an eye was to wield
the destinies of France. In our own time we have
wondered at the rapidity with which a Chamber that
was one day on the point of bringing back the grand-
nephew of Lewis the Sixteenth, found itself a little
later voting that Republic which has since been

20 UOBESriERRE.

ratified by the nation, and has at this moment the
ardent good wishes of every enlightened politician in
Europe. In the same way it is startling to think that
within three years of the beheading of Lewis the
Sixteenth, there was probably not one serious republi-
can in the representative assembly of France. Yet it
is always so. We might make just the same remark
of the House of Commons at Westminster in 1640,
and of the Assembly of Massachusetts or of New
York as late as 1770. The final flash of a long
unconscious train of thought or intent is ever a
surprise and a shock. It is a mistake to set these
swift changes down to political levity ; they were due
rather to quickness of political intuition. It was the
King's attempt at flight in the summer of 1791 that
first created a republican party. It was that unhappy
exploit, and no theoretical preferences, that awoke
France to the necessity of choosing between the sac-
rifice of monarchy and the restoration of territorial
aristocracy.

Political intuition was never one of Robespierre's
conspicuous gifts. But he had a doctrine that for a
certain time served the same purpose. Rousseau had
kindled in him a fervid democratic enthusiasm, and
had penetrated his mind with the principle of the
Sovereignty of the People. This famous dogma con-
tained implicitly within it the more -indisputable truth
that a society ought to be regulated with a view to
the happiness of the people. Such a principle made
it easier for Robespierre to interpret rightly the first

ROBESPIERRE. 21

phases of the revolutionary movement. It helped
him to discern that the concentrated physical force of
the populace was the only sure protection against a
civil war. And if a civil war had broken out in
1789, instead of 1793, all the advantages of authority
would have been against the popular party. The
first insurrection of Paris is associated with the har-
angue of Camille Desmoulins at the Palais Royal,
with the fall of the Bastille, with the murder of the
governor, and a hundred other scenes of melodramatic
horror and the blood-red picturesque. The insurrec-
tion of the Fourteenth of July 1789 taught Robes-
pierre a lesson of practical politics, which exactly
fitted in with his previous theories. In his resent-
ment against the oppressive disorder of monarchy and
feudalism, he had accepted the counter principle that
the people can do no wrong, and nobody of sense now
doubts that in their first great act the people of Paris
did what was right. Six days after the fall of the
Bastille, the Centre were for issuing a proclamation
denouncing popular violence and ordering rigorous
vigilance. Robespierre was then so little known in
the Assembly that even his name was usually misspelt
in the journals. From his obscure bench on the
Mountain he cried out with bitter vehemence against
the proposed proclamation: — 'Revolt! But this
revolt is liberty. The battle is not at its end. To-
morrow, it may be, the shameful designs against us
will be renewed ; and who will there then be to
repulse them, if beforehand we declare the very men

22 ROBESPIERRE.

to be rebels, who have rushed to arms for our protec-
tion and safety V This was the cardinal truth of the
situation. Everybody knows Mirabeau's saying about
Robespierre : — ' That man will go far : he believes
every word that he says!' This is much, but it is
only half. It is not only that the man of power be-
lieves what he says ; what he believes must fit in with
the facts and with the demands of the time. Now
Robespierre's firmness of conviction happened at this
stage to be rightly matched by his clearness of sight.
It is true that a passionate mob, its unearthly
admixture of laughter with fury, of vacancy with
deadly concentration, is as terrible as some uncouth
antediluvian, or the unfamiliar monsters of the sea,
or one of the giant plants that make men shudder
with mysterious fear. The history of our own country
in the eighteenth century tells of the riots against
meeting-houses in Doctor Sacheverell's time, and the
riots against papists and their abettors in Lord George
Gordon's time, and Church-and-King riots in Doctor
Priestley's time. It would be too daring, therefore,
to maintain that the rabble of the poor have any
more unerring political judgment than the rabble of
the opulent. But, in France in 1789, Robespierre
was justified in saying that revolt meant liberty. If
there had been no revolt in July, the court party
woidd have had time to mature their infatuated
designs of violence against the Assembly. In October
these designs had come to life again. The royalists
at Versailles had exultant banquets, at which, in the

i

ROBESPIERRE. 23

presence of the Queen, they drank confusion to all
patriots, and trampled the new emblem of freedom
passionately underfoot. The news of this odious folly
soon travelled to Paris. Its significance was speedily
understood by a populace whose wits were sharpened
by famine. Thousands of fire-eyed women and men
tramped intrepidly out towards Versailles. If they
had done less, the Assembly would have been dis-
persed or arbitrarily decimated, even though such a
measure would certainly have left the government
in desperation.

At that dreadful moment of the Sixth of October,
amid the slaughter of guards and the frantic yells of
hatred against the Queen, it is no wonder that some
were found to urge the King to flee to Metz. If he
had accepted the advice, the course of the Eevolution
would have been different; but its march would have
been just as irresistible, for revolution lay in the force
of a hundred combined circumstances. Lewis, how-
ever, rejected these counsels, and suffered the mob to
carry him in bewildering procession to his capital and
his prison. That great man who was watching French
affairs with such consuming eagerness from distant
Beaconsfield in our English Buckinghamshire, instantly
divined that this procession from Versailles to the
Tuileries marked the fall of the monarchy. 'A
revolution in sentiment, manners, and moral opinions,
the most important of all revolutions in a word,' was
in Burke's judgment to be dated from the Sixth of
October 1789.

24 ROBESPIERRE.

The events of that day did, indeed, give its definite
cast to the situation. The moral authority of the
sovereign came to an end, along with the ancient and
reverend mystery of the inviolability of his person.
The Count d'Artois, the King's second brother, one of
the most worthless of human beings, as incurably
addicted to sinister and suicidal counsels in 1789 as
he was when he overthrew his own throne forty years
later, had run away from peril and from duty after
the insurrection of July. After the insurrection of
October, a troop of the nobles of the court followed
him. The personal cowardice of the Emigrants was
only matched by their political blindness. Many of
the most unwise measures in the Assembly were only
passed by small majorities, and the majorities would
have been transformed into minorities, if in the early
days of the Revolution these unworthy men had only
stood firm at their posts. Selfish oligarchies have
scarcely ever been wanting in courage. The emigrant
noblesse of France are almost the only instance of a
great privileged and territorial caste that had as little
bravery as they had patriotism. The explanation is
that they had been an oligarchy, not of power or
duty, but of self-indulgence. They were crushed by
Richelieu to secure the unity of the monarchy. They
now effaced themselves at the Revolution, and this
secured that far greater object, the unity of the
nation.

The disappearance of so many of the nobles from
France was not the only abdication on the part of

ROBESPIERRE. 25

the conservative powers. Cowed and terrified by the
events of October, no less than three hundred members
of the Assembly sought to resign. The average
attendance even at the most important sittings was
often incredibly small. Thus the Chamber came to
have little more moral authority in face of the people
of Paris than had the King himself. The people of
Paris had themselves become in a day the masters of
France.

This immense change led gradually to a decisive
alteration in the position of Eobespierre. He found
the situation of affairs at last falling into perfect
harmony with his doctrine. Rousseau had taught
him that the people ought to be sovereign, and now
the people were being recognised as sovereign de facto
no less than de jure. Any limitations on the new
divine right united the horror of blasphemy to the
secular wickedness of political treason. After the
Assembly had come to Paris, a famishing mob in a
moment of mad fury murdered an unfortunate baker,
who was suspected of keeping back bread. These
paroxysms led to the enactment of a new martial
law. Eobespierre spoke vehemently against it ; such
a law implied a wrongful distrust of the people. Then
discussions followed as to the property qualification
of an elector. Citizens were classed as active and
passive. Only those were to have votes who paid
direct taxes to the amount of three days' wages in
the year. Robespierre flung himself upon this too
famous distinction with bitter tenacity. If all men

26 ROBESPIERRE.

arc equal, he cried, then all men ought to have votes ;
if he who only pays the amount of one day's work,
has fewer rights than another who pays the amount
of three days, why should not the man who pays ten
days have more rights than the other who only pays
the earnings of three days ? This kind of reasoning
had little weight with the Chamber, but it made the
reasoner very popular with the throng in the galleries.
Even within the Assembly, influence gradually came
to the man who had a parcel of immutable axioms
and postulates, and who was ready with a deduction
and a phrase for each case as it arose. He began to
stand out like a needle of sharp rock, amid the flitting
shadows of uncertain purpose and the vapoury drift
of wandering aims.

Robespierre had no social conception, and he had
nothing which can be described as a policy. He was
the prophet of a sect, and had at this period none of
the aims of the chief of a political party. What he
had was democratic doctrine, and an intrepid logic.
And Robespierre's intrepid logic was the nearest
approach to calm force and coherent character that
the first three years of the Revolution brought into
prominence. When the Assembly met, Necker was
the popular idol. Almost within a few weeks, this
well-meaning, but very incompetent divinity had
slipped from his throne, and Lafayette had taken his
place. Mirabeau came next. The ardent and ani-
mated genius of his eloquence fitted him above all
men to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm.

ROBESPIERRE. 27

And on the memorable Twenty-third of June '89, he
had shown the genuine audacity and resource of a
revolutionary statesman, when he stirred the Chamber
to defy the King's demand, and hailed the royal usher
with the resounding words : — 'You, sir, have neither
place nor right of speech. Go tell those who sent
you that we are here by the will of the people, and
only bayonets shall drive us hence !' But Mirabeau
bore a tainted character, and was always distnistecL.
' All, how the immorality of my youth,' he used to
say, in words that sum up the tragedy of many
a puissant life, ' how the immorality of my youth
hinders the public good !' The event proved that
the popular suspicion was just : the patriot is now no
longer merely suspected, but known, to have sullied
his hands with the money of the court. He did not
sell himself, it has been said ; he allowed himself to
be paid. The distinction was too subtle for men
doing battle for their lives and for freedom, and
Mirabeau's popularity waned towards the middle of
1790. The next favourite was Barnave, the generous
and high-minded spokesman of those sanguine spirits
who to the very end hoped against hope to save both
the throne and its occupant. By the spring of 1791
Barnave followed his predecessors into disfavour.
The Assembly was engaged on the burning question
of the government of the colonies. Were the negro
slaves to be admitted to citizenship, or was a legis-
lature of planters to be entrusted with the task of
social reformation 1 Our own generation has seen in

28 ROBESNERRE.

the republic of the West what strife this political
difficulty is capable of raising. Barnave pronounced
against the negroes. Robespierre, on the contrary,
declaimed against any limitation of the right of the
negro, as a compromise with the avarice, pride, and
cruelty of a governing race, and a guilty trafficking
with the rights of man. Barnave from that day saw
that his laurel crown had gone to Robespierre.

If the people ' called him noble that was now
their hate, him vile that was their garland,' they did
not transfer their affections without sound reason.
Barnave's sensibility was too easily touched. There
are many politicians in every epoch whose principles
grow slack and flaccid at the approach of the golden
sun of royalty. Barnave was one of those who was
sent to bring back the fugitive King and Queen from
Varennes, and the journey by their side in the coach
unstrung his spirit. He became one of the court's
clandestine advisers. Men of this weak susceptibility
of imagination are not fit for times of revolution.
To be on the side of the court was to betray the
cause of the nation. We cannot take too much
pains to realise that the voluntary conversion of
Lewis the Sixteenth to a popular constitution and
the abolition of feudalism, was practically as impos-
sible as the conversion of Pope Pius the Ninth to
the doctrine of a free church in a free' state. Those
who believe in the miracle of free will may think of
this as they please. Sensible people who accept the
scientific account of human character, know that the

ROBESPIERRE. 29

sudden transformation of a man or a woman brought
up to middle age as the heir to centuries of absolutist
tradition, into adherents of a government that agreed
with the doctrines of Locke and Milton, was only
possible on condition of supernatural interference.
The King's good nature was no substitute for political
capacity or insight. An instructive measure of the
degree in which he possessed these two qualities may
be found in that deplorable diary of his, where on
such days as the Fourteenth of July, when the
Bastille fell, and the Sixth of October, when he was
carried in triumph from Versailles to the Tuileries,
he made the simple entrjr, ' JUen.' And he had no
firmness. It was as difficult to keep the King to a
purpose, La Marck said to Mirabeau, as to keep
together a number of well-oiled ivory balls. Lewis,
moreover, was guided by a more energetic and less
compliant character than his own.

Marie Antoinette's high mien in adversity, and
the contrast between the dazzling splendour of her
first years and the scenes of outrage and bloody
death that made the climax of her fate, could not
but strike the imaginations of men. Such contrasts
are the very stuff of which Tragedy, the gorgeous
muse with scepter'd pall, loves to weave her most
imposing raiment. But history must be just; and
the character of the Queen had far more concern in
the disaster of the first five years of the Revolution
than had the character of Robespierre. Every new
document that comes to light heaps up proof that if

30 ROBESPIERRE.

blind and obstinate choice of personal gratification
before the common weal be enough to constitute a
state criminal, then the Queen of France was one of
the worst state criminals that ever afflicted a nation.
The popular hatred of Marie Antoinette sprang from
a sound instinct. We shall never know how much
or how little truth there was in those frightful
charges against her, that may still be read in a
thousand pamphlets. These imputed depravities far
surpass anything that John Knox ever said against
Mar}' Stuart, or that Juvenal has recorded against
Messalina; and, perhaps, for the only parallel we
must look to the hideous stories of the Byzantine
secretary against Theodora, the too famous empress
of Justinian and the persecutor of Belisarius. We
have to remember that all the revolutionary portraits
are distorted by furious passion, and that Marie
Antoinette may no more deserve to be compared to
Mary Stuart than Robespierre deserves to be com-
pared to Ezzelino or to Alva. The aristocrats were
the libellers, if libels they were. It is at least certain
that, from the unlucky hour when the Austrian
archduchess crossed the French frontier, a childish
bride of fourteen, down to the hour when the Queen
of France made the attempt to recross it in resentful
flight one and twenty years afterwards, Marie Antoi-
nette was ignorant, uuteachable, blind to events and
deaf to good counsels, a bitter grief to her heroic
mother, the evil genius of her husband, the despair
of her truest advisers, and an exceedingly bad friend

ROBESPIEREE. 31

to the people of France. When Burke had that
immortal vision of her at Versailles — 'just above the
horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere
she just began to move in, glittering like the morning
star, full of life and splendour and joy' — we know
from the correspondence between Maria Theresa and
her minister at Versailles, that what Burke really
saw was no divinity, but a nighty and troublesome
schoolgirl, an accomplice in all the ignoble intrigues,
and a sharer of all the small busy passions, that
convulse the insects of a court. The levity that
came with her Lorraine blood, broke out in incredible
dissipations ; in indiscreet visits to the masked balls
at the opera, in midnight parades and mystifications
on the terrace at Versailles, in insensate gambling.
'The court of France is turned into a gaming-hell,'
said the Emperor Joseph, the Queen's own brother :
'if they do not amend, the revolution will be cruel.'
These vices or follies were less mischievous than her
intervention in affairs of state. Here her levity was
as marked as in the paltry affairs of the boudoir and
the ante-chamber, and here to levity she added both
dissimulation and vindictiveness. It was the Queen's
influence that procured the dismissal of the two
virtuous ministers by whose aid the King was
striving to arrest the decay of the government of
his kingdom. Malesherbes was distasteful to her
for no better reason than that she wanted his post
for some favourite's favourite. Against Turgot she
conspired with tenacious animosity, because he had

32 ROBESPIERRE.

suppressed a sinecure which she designed for a court
parasite, and because he would not support her
caprice on behalf of a worthless creature of her I
faction. These two admirable men were disgraced
on the same day. The Queen wrote to her mother
that she had not meddled in the affair. This was a
falsehood, for she had even sought to have Turgot
thrown into the Bastille. 'I am as one dashed to
the ground,' cried the great Voltaire, now nearing his
end. 'Never can we console ourselves for having
seen the golden age dawn and vanish. My eyes see
only death in front of me, now that Turgot is gone.
The rest of my days must be all bitterness.' What
hope could there be that the personage who had thus
put out the light of hope for France in 1776, would
welcome that greater flame which was kindled in the
land in 1789?

When people write hymns of pity for the Queen,
we always recall the poor woman whom Arthur Young
met, as he was walking up a hill to ease his horse
near Mars-le-Tour. Though the unfortunate creature
was only twenty-eight, she might have been taken for
sixty or seventy, her figure was so bent, her face so
furrowed and hardened by toil. Her husband, she
said, had a morsel of land, one cow, and a poor little
horse, yet he had to pay forty-two pounds of wheat
and three chickens to one Seigneur, and one hundred
and sixty pounds of oats, one chicken, and one franc
to another, besides very heavy taillcs and other taxes ;
and they had seven children. She had heard that

ROBESPIERRE. 33

' something was to be done by some great folks for
such poor ones, but she did not know who nor how,
but God send us better, for the tailles and the dues
grind us to the earth.' It was such hapless drudges
as this who replenished the Queen's gaming tables
at Versailles. Thousands of them dragged on the
burden of their harassed and desperate days, less like
men and women than beasts of the field wrung and
tortured and mercilessly overladen, in order that the
Queen might gratify her childish passion for diamonds,
or lavish money and estates on worthless female
Polignacs and Lamballes, or kill time at a cost of five
hundred louis a night at lansquenet and the faro
bank. The Queen, it is true, was in all this no worse
than other dissipated women then and since. She
did not realise that it was the system to which she
had stubbornly committed herself, that drove the
people of the fields to cut their crops green to be
baked in the oven, because their hunger could not
wait ; or made them cower whole days in their beds,
because misery seemed to gnaw them there with a
duller fang. That she was unconscious of its effect,
makes no difference in the real drift of her policy;
makes no difference in the judgment that we ought
to pass upon it, nor in the gratitude that is owed to
the stern men who rose up to consume her and her
court with righteous flame. The Queen and the
courtiers, and the hard-faring woman of Mars-le-Tour,
and that whole generation, have long been dust and
shadow ; they have vanished from the earth, as if
VOL. I. D

34 ROBESPIERRE.

they were no more than the fire-flies that the peasant
of the Italian poet saw dancing in the vineyard, as
he took his evening rest on the hillside. They have
all fled back into the impenetrable shade whence they
came ; our minds are free ; and if social equity is not
a chimera, Marie Antoinette was the protagonist of
the most barbarous and execrable of causes.

Let us return to the shaping of the Constitution,
not forgetting that its stability was to depend upon
the Queen. Robespierre left some characteristic marks
on the final arrangements. He imposed upon the
Assembly a motion prohibiting any member of it
from accepting office under the Crown for a period of
four years after the dissolution. Eobespierre from
this time forth constantly illustrated a very singular
truth ; namely, that the most ostentatious faith in
humanity in general seems always to beget the
sharpest distrust of all human beings in particular.
He proceeded further in the same direction. It was
Robespierre who persuaded the Chamber to pass a
self-denying ordinance. All its members were de-
clared ineligible for a seat in the legislature that was
to replace them. The members of the Right on this
occasion went with their bitter foes of the Extreme
Left, and to both parties have been imputed sinister
and Machiavellian motives. The Right, aware that
their own return to the new Assembly was impossible,
were delighted to reduce the men with whom they
had been carrying on incensed battle for two long

ROBESPIERRE. 35

years, to their own obscurity and impotence. Robes-
pierre, on the other hand, is accused of a jealous
desire to exclude Barnave from power. He is accused
also of a deliberate . intention to weaken the new
legislature, in order to secure the preponderance of
the Parisian clubs. There is no evidence that these
malignant feelings were in Robespierre's mind. The
reasons he gave were exactly of the kind that we
should have expected to weigh with a man of his
stamp. There is even a certain truth in them, that
is not inconsistent with the experience of a parlia-
mentary country like our own. To talk, he said, of
the transmission of light and experience from one
assembly to another, was to distrust the public spirit.
The influence of opinion and the general good grows
less, as the influence of parliamentary orators grows
greater. He had no taste, he proceeded with one
of his chilly sneers, for that new science which was
styled the tactics of great assemblies ; it was too like
intrigue. Nothing but truth and reason ought to
reign in a legislature. He did not like the idea of
clever men becoming dominant by skilful tactics, and
then perpetuating their empire from one assembly to
another. He wound up his discourse with some
theatrical talk about disinterestedness. When he sat
down, he was greeted with enthusiastic acclamations,
such as a few months before used to greet the storm-
ful Mirabeau, now wrapped in eternal sleep amid the
stillness of the new Pantheon. The folly of Robes-
pierre's inferences is obvious enough. If only truth

36 ROBESPIERRE.

and reason ought to weigh in a legislature, then it is
all the more important not to exclude any body of
men through whom truth and reason may possibly
enter. Robespierre had striven hard to remove all
restrictions from admission to the electoral franchise.
He did not see that to limit the choice of candidates
was in itself the most grievous of all restrictions.

The common view has been that the Constitution
of 1791 perished because its creators were thus dis-
abled from defending the work of their hands. This
view led to a grave mistake four years later, after
Robespierre had gone to his grave. The Conven-
tion, framing the Constitution of the Year III., decided
that two-thirds of the existing assembly should keep
their places, and that only one-third should be popu-
larly elected. This led to the revolt of the Thirteenth
Vend6miaire, and afterwards to the coup d'etat of the
Eighteenth Fructidor. In that sense, no doubt,
Robespierre's proposal was the indirect root of much
mischief. But it is childish to believe that if a
hundred of the most prominent members of the Con-
stituent had found seats in the new assembly, they
would have saved the Constitution. Their experi-
ence, the loss of which it is the fashion to deplore,
could have had no application to the strange combi-
nations of untoward circumstance that were now
rising up with such deadly rapidity in every quarter
of the horizon, like vast sombre banks of impene-
trable cloud. Prudence in new cases, as has been
somewhere said, can do nothing on grounds of retro-

ROBESPIEREE. 37

spect. The work of the Constituent was doomed
by the very nature of things. Their assumption
that the Revolution was made, while all France was
still torn by fierce and unappeasable disputes as to
seignorial rights, was one of the most striking pieces
of self-deception in history. It is told how in the
eleventh century, when the fervent hosts of the Cru-
saders tramped across Europe on their way to deliver
the Holy City from the hands of the unbelievers, the
wearied children, as they espied each new town that
lay in their interminable march, cried out with joy-
ful expectation, ' Is not this, then, Jerusalem V So
France had set out on a portentous journey, little
knowing how far off was the end ; lightly taking each
poor halting-place for the deeply longed-for goal ; and
waxing more fiercely disappointed, as each new height
that they gained only disclosed yet farther and more
unattainable horizons. ' Alas,' said Burke, ' they
little know how many a weary step is to be taken,
before they can form themselves into a mass which
has a true political personality.'

An immense revolution had been effected, but by
what force were its fruits to be guarded 1 Each step
in the revolution had raised a host of irreconcilable
enemies. The rights of property, the old and jealous
associations of local independence, the traditions of
personal dignity, the relations of the civil to the
spiritual power — these were the momentous matters
about which the lawmakers of the Constituent had
exercised themselves. The parties of the Chamber

38 ROBESPIERRE.

had for these two years past been laying mine and
countermine among the very deepest foundations of
societjr. One by one each great corporation of the
old order had been alienated from the new order.
It was inevitable that it should be so. Let us look
at one or two examples of this. The monarchy had
imposed administrative centralisation upon France
without securing national unity. Thus the great
provinces that had been slowly added one after the
other to the monarchy, while becoming members of
the same kingdom, still retained different institutions
and isolated usages. The time was now come when
France should be France, and its inhabitants French-
men, and no longer Bretons, Normans, Gascons, Pro-
vencals. The Assembly by a single decree (1790)
redivided the country into eighty-three departments.
It wiped out at a stroke the separate administrations,
the separate parlements, the peculiar privileges, and
even the historic names of the old provinces. We
need not dwell on the significance of this change
here, but will only remark in passing that the stub-
born disputes from the time of the Regency' down-
wards between the Crown and the provincial parle-
ments turned, under other names and in other forms,
upon this very issue of the unification of the law.
The Crown was with the progressive party, but it
lacked the strength and courage to set aside retro-
grade local sentiment as the Constituent Assembly
was able to set it aside.

Then this prodigious change in the distribution of

ROBESPIERRE. 39

government was accompanied by no less prodigious a
change in the source of power. Popular election re-
placed the old system of territorial privilege and
aristocratic prerogative. The effect of this vital
innovation, followed as it was a few months later by
a decree abolishing titles and armorial bearings, was
to complete the estrangement of the old privileged
classes from the revolutionary movement. All that
they had meant to concede was the payment of an
equal land tax. What was life worth to the noble,
if common people were to be allowed to wear arms
and to command a company of foot or a troop of
horse ; if he was no longer to have thousands of acres
left waste for the chase ; if he was compelled to sue
for a vote where he had only yesterday reigned as
manorial lord ; if, in short, he was at a stroke to lose
all those delights of insolence and vanity which had
made, not the decoration, but the very substance, of
his days 1

Nor were the nobles of the sword and the red-
heeled slipper the only outraged class. The magis-
tracy of the provincial parliaments were inflamed with
resentment against changes that stripped them of the
power of exciting against the new government the
same factious and impracticable spirit with which they
had on so many occasions embarrassed the old. The
clergy were thrown even still more violently into
opposition. The Assembly, sorely pressed for re-
sources, declared the property held by ecclesiastics,
amounting to a revenue of not less than eight million

40 ROBESPIERRE.

pounds sterling a year, or double that amount in
modern values, to be the property of the nation.
Talleyrand carried a measure decreeing the sale of the
ecclesiastical domain. The clergy were as intensely
irritated as laymen would have been by a similar
assertion of sovereign right. And their irritation was
made still more dangerous by the next set of measures
against them.

The Assembly withdrew all recognition of Catholi-
cism as the religion of the State ; monastic vows were
abolished, and orders and congregations suppressed ;
the ecclesiastical divisions were made to coincide with
the civil divisions-, a bishop being allotted to each
department. What was a more important revolution
than all, bishops and incumbents were henceforth to
be appointed by popular election. The Assembly,
who had always the institutions of our own country
before them, meant to introduce into France the
system of the Church of England, which was even
then an anachronism in the land of its birth ; much
worse was such a system an anachronism, after belief
had been sapped by a Voltaire and an Encyclopaedia.
The clergy both showed and excited a mutinous spirit.
The Assembly, by way of retort, decreed that all
ecclesiastics should take the oath of allegiance to the
civil constitution of the clergj'-, on pain of forfeiture of
their benefices. Five-sixths of the clergy refused, and
the result was an outbreak of religious fury in the great
towns of the south and elsewhere, which recalled the
violence of the sixteenth century and the Eeformation.

ROBESPIERRE. 41

Thus when the Constituent Assembly ceased from
its labours, the popular party had to face the mocking
and defiant privileged classes ; the magistracy, whose I
craft and calling were gone ; and the clergy and as/
many of the flocks as shared the holy vindictiveness
of their pastors. Immense material improvements
had been made, but who was to guard them against
all these powerful and exasperated bands 1 No
chamber could execute so portentous an office, least
of all a chamber that was bound to work in accord
with a King, who at the very moment when he was
swearing fidelity to the new order of things, was
sending entreaties to the King of Prussia and to the
Emperor, his brother-in-law, to overthrow the new
order and bring back the old. If the Revolution had
achieved priceless gains for France, they could only
be preserved on condition that public action was
directed by those who valued these, gains for them-
selves and for their children above all things else —
above the monarchy, above the constitution, above
peace, above their own sorry lives. There was only
one party who showed this passionate devotion, this
fanatical resolution not to suffer the work that had
been done to be undone, and never to allow France
to sink back from exalted national life into the
lethargy of national death. That party was the
Jacobins, and, above all, the austere and rigorous j
Jacobins of Paris. On their ascendancy depended I
the triumph of the Revolution, and on the triumph <
of the Revolution depended the salvation of France

42 ROBESPIERRE.

Their ascendancy meant a Jacobin dictatorship, and
against this, as against dictatorship in all its forms,
many things have been said, and truly said. But the
one most important thing that can be said about
Jacobin dictatorship is that, in spite of all the dolorous
mishaps and hateful misdeeds that marked its course,
it was still the only instrument capable of concentrat-
ing and utilising the dispersed social energy of the
French people. The crisis was not a crisis of logic
but of force, and the Jacobins alone understood, as
the old Covenanters had understood, that problems
of force are not solved by phrases, but by mastery
and the sword.

The great popular club of Paris was the centre of
all those who looked at events in this spirit. The
•j Legislative Assembly, the successor of the Constituent,
\ met in the month of October 1791. Like its pre-
decessor, the Legislative contained a host of excellent
and patriotic men, and they at once applied them-
selves to the all-important task, which the Constituent
had left so deplorably incomplete, of finally breaking
.1 down the old feudal rights. The most important
group in the new chamber were the deputies from the
jGironde. Events soon revealed violent dissents be-
tween the Girondins and the Jacobins, but, for some
months after the meeting of the Legislative, Girondins
and Jacobins represented together in unbroken unity
the great popular party. From this time until the
fall of the monarchy, the whole of this popular party
in all its branches found their rallying-place, not in

ROBESPIERRE. 43

the Assembly, but in the Jacobin Club ; and the I
ascendancy of the Jacobin Club embodied the dictator-
ship of Paris. It was only from Paris that the whole!
circle of events could be commanded. When the L
peasants had got what they wanted, that is to say the I
emancipation of the land, they were ready to think ;
that the Revolution was in safety and at an end. j
They were in no position to see the enmity of the j
exiles, the dangerous selfishness of Austria and Prussia, |
the disloyal machinations of the court, the reactionary I
sentiment of La Vendue, the absolute unworkable- -
ness of the new constitution. Arthur Young, in the •
height of the agitations of the Constituent Assembly,
found himself at Moulins, the capital of the Bourbon-
nais, and on the great post-road to Italy. He went
to the best coffee-house in the town, and found as
many as twenty tables spread for company, but as for
a newspaper, he says he might as well have asked for
an elephant. In the capital of a great province, the
seat of an intendant, at a moment like that, with a
National Assembly voting a revolution, and not ai
newspaper to tell the people whether Fayette, Mira-j,
beau, or Lewis xvr. were on the throne ! Could
such a people as this, he cries, ever have made a
revolution or become free 1 * Never in a thousand
centuries : the enlightened mob of Paris have done
the whole.' And that was the plain truth. What
was involved in such a truth, we shall see presently.

Robespierre had now risen to be one of the fore- \
most men in France. To borrow the figure of an 1

44 ROBESPIERRE.

older chief of French faction, from trifling among the
violins in the orchestra, he had ascended to the stage
itself, and had a right to perform leading parts.
/Disqualified for sitting in the Assembly, he wielded
J greater power than ever in the Club. The Constit-
uent had been full of his enemies. ' Alone with my
own soul,' he once cried to the Jacobins, 'how could
I have borne struggles that were beyond any human
strength, if I had not raised my spirit to God V This
isolation marked him with a kind of theocratic dis-
tinction. These communings with the unseen powers
gave a certain indefinable prerogative to a man, even
among the children of the century of Voltaire. Con-
dorcet, the youngest of the intimates and disciples of
Voltaire, of D'Alembert, of Turgot, was the first to
sound bitter warning that Robespierre was at heart a
priest. The suggestion was more than a gibe. Robes-
pierre had the typic sacerdotal temperament, its
sense of personal importance, its thin unction, its
private leanings to the stake and the cord ; and he
had one of those deplorable natures that seem as if
they had never in their lives known the careless joys
of a springtime. By and by, from mere priest he
developed into the deadlier carnivore, the Inquisitor
The absence of advantages of bodily presence has
never been fatal to the pretensions of the pontiff.
Robespierre was only a couple of inches above five
feet in height, but the Grand Monarch himself was
hardly more. His eyes were small and weak, and he
usually wore spectacles ; his face was pitted by the

ROBESPIERRE. 45

marks of small -pox ; his complexion was dull and
sometimes livid ; the tones of his voice were dry and
shrill ; and he spoke with the vulgar accent of his
province. Such is the accepted tradition, and there
is no reason to dissent from it. It is fair, however,
to remember that Eobespierre's enemies had command
of his historic reputation at its source, and this is
always a great advantage for faction, if not for truth.
So Eobespierre's voice and person may have been I
maligned, just as Aristophanes may have been a
calumniator when he accused Cleon of having an
intolerably loud voice and smelling of the tanyard.
What is certain is that Robespierre was a master of Ir
effective oratory adapted for a violent popular audience, I (
to impress, to persuade, and to command. The Con- J
vention would have yawned, if it had not trembled
under him, but the Jacobin Club never found him
tedious. Robespierre's style had no richness either
of feeling or of phrase ; no fervid originality, no happy
violences. If we turn from a page of Rousseau to a
page of Robespierre, we feel that the disciple has none
of the thrilling sonorousness of the master ; the glow
and the ardour have become metallic ; the long-drawn
plangency is parodied by shrill notes of splenetic
complaint. The rhythm has no broad wings ; the
phrases have no quality of radiance ; the oratorical
glimpses never lift the spirit into new worlds. We
are never conscious of those great pulses of strong
emotion that shake and vibrate through the nobly-
measured periods of Cicero or Bossuet or Burke.

46 ROBESPIERKE.

Robespierre could not rival the vivid and highly-
icoloured declamation of Vergniaud; his speeches
/were never heated with the ardent passion that poured
like a torrent of fire through some of the orations of
Isnard; nor, above all, had he any mastery of that
dialect of the Titans, by which Danton convulsed
an audience with fear, with amazement, or with the
spirit of defiant endeavour. The absence of these
intenser qualities did not make Robespierre's speeches
less effective for their own purpose. On the contrary,
when the air has become torrid, and passionate utter-
ance is cheap, then severity in form is very likely to

k pass for good sense in substance. That Robespierre
had decent fluency, copiousness, and finish, need
hardly be said. The French have an artistic sense ;
they have never accepted our own whimsical doctrine,

I that a man's politics must be sagacious, if his speaking

f is only clumsy enough. Robespierre more than once
showed himself ready with a forcible reply on critical
occasions : this only makes him an illustration the
more of the good oratorical rule, that he is most likely
to come well out of the emergency of an improvisation,
who is usually most careful to prepare. Robespierre
was as solicitous about the correctness of his speech,
as he was about the neatness of his clothes ; he no
more grudged the pains given to the polishing of his
discourses than he grudged the time given every day
fco the powdering of his hair.

Nothing was more remarkable than his dexterity

f jin presenting his case. James Mill used to point out

ROBESPIERRE. 47

to his son among other skilful arts of Demosthenes,
these two : first, that he said everything important to
his purpose at the exact moment when he had brought
the minds of his hearers into the state most fitted to
receive it ; second, that he insinuated gradually and
indirectly into their minds ideas which would have
roused opposition if they had been expressed more
directly. Mr. Mill once called the attention of the
present writer to exactly the same kind of rhetorical
skill in the speeches of Robespierre. The reader may
do well to turn, for excellent specimens of this, to the
speech of January 11, 1792, against the war, or that
of May 1794 against atheism. The logic is stringent,
but the premises are arbitrary. Eobespierre is as one
who should iterate indisputable propositions of abstract
geometry and mechanics, while men are craving an
architect who shall bridge the gulf of waters. Ex-
uberance of high words no longer conceals the sterility
of his ideas and the shallowness of his method. We
should say of his speeches, as of so much of the
speaking and writing of the time, that it is transparent
and smooth, but there is none of that quality which
the critics of painting call Texture.

His listeners, however, in the old refectory of the
Convent of the Jacobins took little heed of these
things ; the matter was too absorbing, the issue too
vital. A hundred years before, the hunted Cove-
nanters of the Western Lowlands, with Claverhouse's
dragoons a few miles off, exulted in the endless
exhortations and expositions of their hill preachers ;

48 KOBESPIEItRE.

they relished nothing so keenly as three hours of
Mucklewrath, followed by three hours more of Peter
Poundtext. We now find the jargon of the Muckle-
wraths and the Poundtexts of the Solemn League and
Covenant, dead as it is, still not devoid of the
picturesque and the impressive. If we cannot say
the same of the great preacher of the Declaration of
the Rights of Man, the reason is partly that time has
not yet softened the tones, and partly that there is
no one in all .the world with whom it is so difficult to
sympathise, as with the narrower fanatics of our own
particular faith.
J We have still to mark the trait that above every-
J thing else gave to Robespierre the trust and confi-
\ dence of Paris. As men listened to him, they had
I full faith in the integrity of the speaker. And
! Robespierre in one way deserved this confidence.
(He was eminently the possessor of a conscience. When
/the strain of circumstance in the last few months of
his life pressed him towards wrong, at least before
doing wrong he was forced to lie to his own conscience.
\ This is a kind of honesty, as the world goes. ' In the
ISalon of 1791 an artist exhibited Robespidre's portrait,
/simply inscribing it, The Incorruptible. Throngs passed
before it every day, and ratified the honourable desig-
nation by eager murmurs of approval. The democratic
journals were loud in panegyric on the unsleeping

\ sentinel of liberty. They loved to speak of him as
the modern Fabricius, and delighted to recall the
words of Pyrrhus, that it is easier to turn the sun

ROBESPIERRE. 49

from its course, than to turn Fabricius from the path
of honour. Patriotic parents eagerly besought him
to be sponsor for their children. Ladies of wealth,
including at least one countrywoman of our own,
vainly entreated him to accept their purses, for women
are quick to recognise the temperament of the priest,
and recognising they adore. A rich widow of Nantes
besought him with pertinacious tenderness to accept
not only her purse but her hand. Mirabeau's sister
hailed him as an eagle floating through the blue
heavens.

Robespierre's life was frugal and simple, as must
always be seemly in the spokesman of the dumb
multitude whose lives are very hard. He had a
single room in the house of Duplay, at the extreme
west end of the long Rue Saint Honore, half a mile
from the Jacobin Club, and less than that from the
Riding School of the Tuileries, where the Constituent
and Legislative Assemblies held session. His room,
which served him for bed-chamber as well as for the
uses of the day, was scantily furnished, and he shared
the homely fare of his host. Duplay was a carpenter,
a sworn follower of Robespierre, and the whole family
cherished their guest as if he had been a son and a
brother. Between him and the eldest daughter of
+he house there grew up a more tender sentiment,
and Robespierre looked forward to the joys of the
hearth, so soon as his country should be delivered
from the oppressors without and the traitors within.
Eagerly as Robespierre delighted in his popularity,
vol. I. E

50 ROBESPIERRE.

he intended it to be a force and not a decoration. An
occasion of testing his influence arose in the winter
of 1791. The situation had become more and more
difficult. The court was more disloyal and more
perverse, as its hopes that the nightmare would come
to an end became fainter. In the summer of 1791,
the German Emperor, the King of Prussia, and minor
champions of retrograde causes issued the famous
Declaration of PHnitz. The menace of intervention V
was the one element needed to make the position of
the monarchy desperate. It roused France to fever
heat. For along with the foreign kings were the
French princes of the blood and the French nobles.
In the spring of 1792, the Assembly forced the King
to declare war against Austria. Robespierre, in spite
of the strong tide of warlike feeling, led the Jacobin
opposition to the war. This is one of the most
sagacious acts of his career, for the hazards of the
conflict were terrible. If the foreigners ami the
emigrant nobles were victorious, all that the Revolu-
tion had won would be instantly and irretrievably
\ lost. If, on the other hand, the French armies were
victorious, one of two disasters might follow. Either
the troops might become a weapon in the hands of
the court and the reactionary party, for the suppres-
sion of all the progressive parties alike ; or else their
general might make himself supreme. Robespierre
divined, what the Girondins did not, that Narbonne
and the court, in accepting the cry for war, were
secretly designing, first, to crush the faction of emi-

KOBESPIEKRE. 51

grant nobles, then to make the King popular at home,
and thus finally to construct a strong royalist army.
The Constitutional party in the Leglislative Assembly
had the same ideas as Narbonne. ' The Girondins
sought war ; first, from a genuine, if not a profoundly
wise, enthusiasm for liberty, which they would fain
have spread all over the world ; and next, because
they thought that war would increase their popularity,
and give them decisive control of the situation.

The first effect of the war declared in April 1792
was to shake down the throne. Operations had no
sooner begun than the King became an object of bitter
and amply warranted suspicion. Neither the leaders
nor the people had forgotten his flight a year before
to place himself at the head of the foreign invaders,
nor the letter that he had left behind him for the
National Assembly, protesting against all that had
been done. They were again reminded of what short
shrift they might expect if the King's friends should
come back. The Duke of Brunswick at the head of
the foreign army set out on his march, and issued his
famous proclamation to the inhabitants of France.
He demanded immediate and unconditional submis-
sion ; he threatened with fire and sword every town,
village, or hamlet, that should dare to defend itself ;
and finally, he swore that if the smallest violence or
insult were done to the King or his family, the city
of Paris should be handed over to military execution
and absolute destruction. This insensate document
bears marks in every line of the implacable hate and

52 ROBESPIERRE.

burning thirst for revenge that consumed the aristo-
cratic refugees. Only civil war can awaken such rage
as Brunswick's manifesto betrayed. It was drawn up
by the French nobles at Coblenz. He merely signed
it. The reply to it was the memorable insurrection
of the Tenth of August 1792. The King was thrown
into prison, and the Legislative Assembly made Avay
for the National Convention.

I Robespierre's part in the great rising of August
was only secondary. Only a few weeks before he
had started a journal and written articles in a con-
stitutional sense. M. d'Hericault believes a story
that Robespierre's aim in this had been to have him-
self accepted as tutor for the young Dauphin. It is
impossible to prove a negative, but we find great
difficulty in believing that such a post could ever
have been an object of Robespierre's ambition. Now
and always he showed a rather singular preference
for the substance of power over its glitter. He was
vain and an egoist, but in spite of this, and in spite
of his passion for empty phrases, he was not without
a sense of reality.

The insurrection of the 10th of August, however,
was the idea, not of Robespierre, but of a more com-
manding personage, who now became one of the fore-
most of the Jacobin chiefs. De Maistre, that ardent
champion of reaction, found a striking argument for
the presence of the divine hand in the Revolution, in
the intense mediocrity of the revolutionary leaders.
How could such men, he asked, have achieved such

ROBESPIERRE. 53

results, if they had not been instruments of the direct-
ing will of heaven ? Danton at any rate is above this
caustic criticism. Danton was of the Herculean type
of a Luther, though without Luther's deep vision
of spiritual things; or a Chatham, though without
Chatham's august majesty of life; or a Cromwell,
though without Cromwell's calm steadfastness of patri-
otic purpose. His visage and port seemed to declare
his character : dark overhanging brows ; eyes that had
the gleam of lightning ; a savage mouth ; an immense
head; the voice of a Stentor. Madame Roland
pictured him as a fiercer Sardanapalus. Artists called
him Jove the Thunderer. His enemies saw in him
the Satan of the Paradise Lost. He was no moral
regenerator ; the difference between him and Robes-
pierre is typified in Danton's version of an old saying,
that he who hates vices hates men. He was not free
from that careless life-contemning desperation, which
sometimes belongs to forcible natures. Danton cannot
be called noble, because nobility implies a purity, an
elevation, and a kind of seriousness which were not
his. He was too heedless of his good name, and too
blind to the truth that though right and wrong may
be near neighbours, yet the line that separates them
is of an awful sacredness. If Robespierre passed for
a hypocrite by reason of his scruple, Danton seemed
a desperado by his airs of 'immoral thoughtlessness.'
But the world forgives much to a royal size, and
Danton was one of the men who strike deep notes.
He had that largeness of motive, fulness of nature,

54 ROBESPIERRE.

and capaciousness of mind, which will always redeem
a multitude of infirmities.

Though the author of some of the most tremendous
and far-sounding phrases of an epoch that was only
too rich in them, yet phrases had no empire over him;
he was their master, not their dupe. Of all the men
who succeeded Mirabeau as directors of the unchained
forces, we feel that Danton alone was in his true
element. Action, which poisoned the blood of such
men as Eobespierre, and drove such men as Vergniaud
out of their senses with exaltation, was to Danton his
native_sphere. When France was for a moment dis-
couraged, it was he who nerved her to new effort by
the electrifying cry, ' We must dare, and again dare,
[and without end dare/' If his rivals or his friends
seemed too intent on trifles, too apt to confound side
issues with the central aim of the battle, Danton was
ever ready to urge them to take a juster measure : —
' When the edifice is all ablaze, I take little heed of the
knaves who are pilfering the houseJwld goods ; I rush to
put out the flames.' When base egoism was compromis-
ing a cause more priceless than the personality of any
man, it was Danton who made them ashamed by the
soul-inspiring exclamation, ' Let my name be blotted out
and my memory perish, if only France may be free.' The
Girondins denounced the popular clubs of Paris as
^hives of lawlessness and outrage. Danton warned
them that it were wiser to go to these seething
societies and to guide them, than to waste breath in
futile denunciation. ' A nation in revolution,' he cried

ROBESPIERRE. 55

to them, in a superb figure, ' is like the bronze boiling
and foaming and purifying itself in the cauldron.
Not yet is the statue of Liberty cast. Fiercely boils
the metal ; have an eye on the furnace, or the flame
will surely scorch you.' If there was murderous work
below the hatches, that was all the more reason why
the steersman should keep his hand strong and ready
on the wheel, with an eye quick for each new drift in
the hurricane, and each new set in the raging currents.
This is ever the figure under which one conceives
Danton — a Titanic shape doing battle with the fury
of the seas, yielding while flood upon flood sweeps
wildly over him, and then with unshaken foothold
and undaunted front once more surveying the waste
of waters, and striving with dexterous energy to force
the straining vessel over the waters of the bar.

La Fayette had called the huge giant of popular
force from its squalid lurking-places, and now he
trembled before its presence, and fled from it shrieking,
with averted hands. Marat thrust swords into the
giant's half-unwilling grasp, and plied him with bloody
incitement to slay hip and thigh, and so filled the
land with a horror that has not faded from out of
men's minds to this day. Danton instantly discerned \
that the problem was to preserve revolutionary energy, j
and still to persuade the insurgent forces to retire once \
more within their boundaries. Eobespierre discerned j
this too, but he was paralysed and bewildered by his ■
own principles, as the convinced doctrinaire is so apf |
to be amid the perplexities of practice. The teaching \

56 110BESPIERKE.

of Rousseau was ever pouring like thin smoke among
his ideas, and clouding his view of actual conditions.
The Tenth of August produced a considerable change
in Robespierre's point of view. It awoke him to the
precipitous steepness of the slope down which the
revolutionary car was rushing headlong. His faith
in the infallibility of the people suffered no shock,
but he was in a moment alive to the need of walking
warily, and his whole march from now until the end,
twenty-three months later, became timorous, cunning,
and oblique. His intelligence seemed to move in
subterranean tunnels, with the gleam of an equivocal
premiss at one end, and the mist of a vague conclusion
at the other.

The enthusiastic pedant, with his narrow under-
standing, his thin purism, and his idyllic sentimental-
ism, found that the summoning archangel of his
paradise proved to be a ruffian with a pike. The
shock must have been tremendous. Robespierre did
not quail nor retreat ; he only revised his notion of
the situation. A curious interview once took place
between him and Marat. Robespierre began by assur-
ing the Friend of the People that he quite under-
stood the atrocious demands for blood with which
the columns of Marat's newspaper were filled, to be
merely useful exaggerations of his real designs. Marat
repelled the disparaging imputation of clemency and
common sense, and talked in his familiar vein of
poniarding brigands, burning despots alive in their
palaces, and impaling the traitors of the Assembly

KOBESPIERRE.. 57

on their own benches. 'Kobespierre,' says Marat^
' listened to me with affright ; he turned pale and
said nothing. The interview confirmed the opinion
I had always had of him, that he united the integrity
of a thoroughly honest man and the zeal of a good
patriot, with the enlightenment of a wise senator,
but that he was without either the views or the
audacity of a real statesman.' The picture is in-
structive, for it shows us Robespierre's invariable
habit of leaving violence and iniquity unrebuked ; of
conciliating the practitioners of violence and iniquity ;
and of contenting himself with an inward hope of
turning the world into a right course by fine words. J
He had no audacity in Marat's sense, but he was no
coward. He knew, as all these men knew, that almost
from hour to hour he carried his life in his hand, yet
he declined to seek shelter in the obscurity which
saved such men as Sieyes. But if he had courage,
he had not the initiative of a man of action. He
invented none of the ideas or methods of the Revolu-
tion, not even the Reign of Terror, but he was very
dexterous in accepting or appropriating what more
audacious spirits than himself had devised and en-
forced. The pedant, cursed with the ambition to be
a ruler of men, is a curious study. He would be
glad not to go too far, and yet his chief dread is lest
he be left behind. His consciousness of pure aims
allows him to become an accomplice in the worst
crimes. Suspecting himself at bottom to be a theorist,
he hastens to clear his character as man of practice

58 ROBESPIERRE.

by conniving at an enormity. Thus, in September
|/1792, a band of miscreants committed the grievous
massacres in the prisons of Paris. Eobespierre,
though the best evidence goes to show that he not
only did not abet the prison murders, but in his
heart deplored them, yet after the event did not
scruple to justify what had been done. This was
the beginning of a long course of compliance with
sanguinary misdeeds, for which Eobespierre has been
as hotly execrated as if he prompted them. We do
not, for the moment, measure the relative degrees of
guilt that attached to mere compliance on the one
hand, and cruel origination on the other. But his
I position in the Eevolution is not rightly understood,
unless we recognise him as being in almost every case
an accessory after the fact.

Between the fall of Lewis in 1792 and the fall of
Eobespierre in 1794, France was the scene of two
main series of events. One set comprises the repulse
of the invaders, the suppression of an extensive civil
war, and the attempted reconstruction of a social
framework. The other comprises the rapid phases
of an internecine struggle of violent and short-lived
factions. By an unhappy fatality, due partly to anti-
democratic prejudice, and partly to men's unfailing
passion for melodrama, the Eeign of Terror has been
popularly taken for the central and most important
part of the revolutionary epic. This is nearly as
absurd as it would be to make Gustave Flourens'
manifestation of the Fifth of October, or the rising

ROBESPIERRE. 59

of the Thirty-first of October, the most prominent
features in a history of the war of French defence
in our own day. In truth, the Terror was a mere
episode ; and just as the rising of October 1870 was
due to Marshal Bazaine's capitulation at Metz, it is
easy to see that, with one exception, every violent I
movement in Paris, from 1792 to 1794, was due toj
menace or disaster on the frontier. Every one oi\
the famous days of Paris was an answer to some
enemy without. The storm of the Tuileries on the*
Tenth of August, as we have already said, was the
response to Brunswick's proclamation. The bloody
days of September were the reaction of panic at the
capture of Longwy and Verdun by the Prussians.
The surrender of Cambrai provoked the execution of
Marie Antoinette. The defeat of Aix-la-Chapelle
produced the abortive insurrection of the Tenth of
March ; and the treason of Dumouriez, the reverses
of Custine, and the rebellion in La Vend6e, produced
the effectual insurrection of the Thirty-first of May
1793. The last of these two risings of Paris, headed
by the Commune, against the Convention which was
until then controlled by the Girondins, at length gave
the government of France and the defence of the
Revolution definitely over to the Jacobins. Their
patriotic dictatorship lasted unbroken for a short
period of ten months, and then the great party broke
up into factions. The splendid triumphs of the dic-
tatorship have been, in England at any rate, too
usually forgotten, and only the crimes of the factions

60 ROBESPIERRE.

remembered. Robespierre's history unfortunately be-
longs to the less important battle.

II

] The Girondins were driven out of the Convention
' by the insurgent Parisians at the beginning of June
1793. The movement may be roughly compared to
that of the Independents in our own Rebellion, when
the army compelled the withdrawal of eleven of the
Presbyterian leaders from the parliament ; or, it may
recall Pride's memorable Purge of the same famous
assembly. Both cases illustrate the common truth
that large deliberative bodies, be they never so
excellent for purposes of legislation, and even for a
general control of the executive government in ordi-
nary times, are found to be essentially unfit for directing
a military crisis. If there are any historic examples
that at first seem to contradict such a proposition, it
will be found that the bodies in question were close
aristocracies, like the Great Council of Venice, or the
Senate of Rome in the strong days of the Common-
wealth; they. were never the creatures of popular
election, with varying aims and a diversified political
spirit. Modern publicists have substituted the divine
right of assemblies for the old divine right of mon-
archies. Those who condone the violence done to
the King on the Tenth of August, and even acquiesce
in his execution five months afterwards, are relentless

ROBESPIERRE. 61

against the violence clone to the Convention on the
Thirty-first of May. We confess ourselves unable to
follow this transfer of the superstition of sacrosanctity
from a king to a chamber. No doubt, the sooner a
nation acquires a settled government, the better for it,
provided the government be efficient. But if it be
not efficient, the mischief of actively suppressing it
may well be fully outweighed by the mischief of
retaining it. We have no wish to smooth over the
perversities of a revolutionary time ; they cost a
nation very dear ; but if all the elements of the state
are in furious convulsion and uncontrollable efferves-
cence, then it is childish to measure the march of
events by the standard of happier days of social peace
and political order. The prospect before France
at the violent close of Girondin supremacy was as
formidable as any nation has ever yet had to confront
in the history of the world. Rome was not more
critically placed when the defeat of Varro on the plain
of Cannse had broken up her alliances and ruined her
army. The brave patriots of the Netherlands had
no gloomier outlook at that dolorous moment when
the Prince of Orange had left them, and Alva had
been appointed to bring them back by rapine, confla-
gration, and murder, under the loathed yoke of the
Spanish tyrant.

Let us realise the conditions that Robespierre and
Danton and the other Jacobin leaders had now to
face. In the north-west one division of the fugitive
Girondins was forming an army at Caen ; in the

62 ROBESPIERRE.

south-west another division was doing the same at
Bordeaux. Marseilles and Lyons were rallying all
the disaffected and reactionary elements in the south-
east. La Vendee had flamed out in wild rebellion for
Church and King. The strong places on the north
frontier, and the strong places on the east, were in
the hands of the foreign enemy. The fate of the
Revolution lay in the issue of a struggle between
Paris, with less than a score of departments on her
side, and all the rest of France and the whole Euro-
pean coalition marshalled against her. And even
this was not the worst. In Paris itself a very con-
siderable proportion of its half-million of inhabitants
were disaffected to the revolutionary cause. Reaction-
ary historians dwell on the fact that such risings as
that of the Tenth of August were devised by no more
than half of the sections into which Paris was divided.
It was common, they say, for half a dozen individuals
to take upon themselves to represent the fourteen or
fifteen hundred other members of a section. But
what better proof can we have that if France was to
be delivered from restored feudalism and foreign
spoliation, the momentous task must be performed
by those who had sense to discern the awful peril,
and energy to encounter it 1

The Girondins had made their incapacity plain.
The execution of the King had filled them with alarm,
and with hatred against the ruder and more robust
party who had forced that startling act of vengeance
upon them. Puny social disgusts prevented them

ROBESPIERRE. 63

from cooperating with Danton or with Robespierre.
Prussia and Austria were not more redoubtable or more
hateful to them than was Paris, and they wasted, in
futile recriminations about the September massacres
or the alleged peculations of municipal officers, the
time and the energy that should have been devoted
without let or interruption to the settlement of the
administration and the repulse of the foe. It is im-
possible to think of such fine characters as Vergniaud
or Madame Roland without admiration, or of their
untimely fate without pity. But the deliverance of
a people beset by strong and implacable enemies could
not wait on mere good manners and fastidious senti-
ments, when these comely things were in company
with the most stupendous want of foresight ever
shown by a political party. How can we measure
the folly of men who so missed the conditions of the
problem as to cry out in the Convention itself, almost
within earshot of the Jacobin Club, that if any insult
were offered to the national representation, the
departments would rise, ' Paris would be annihilated ;
and men would come to search on the banks of the
Seine whether such a city had ever existed ! ' It was
to no purpose that Danton urgently rebuked the
senseless animosity with which the Right poured
incessant malediction on the Left, and the wild shriek-
ing hate with which the Left retaliated on the Right.
The battle was to the death, and it was the Girondina
who first menaced their political foes with vengeance
and the guillotine. As it happened, the treason of

64 ROBESPIERRE.

Dumouriez and their own ineptitude destroyed them
before revenge was within reach. Such a consumma-
tion was fortunate for their country. It was the
Girondins whose want of union and energy had by
the middle of 1793 brought France to distraction and
imminent ruin. It was a short year of Jacobin
government that by the summer of 1794 had welded
the nation together again, and finally conquered the
invasion. The city of the Seine had once more shown
itself what it had been for nine centuries, ever since
the days of Odo, Count of Paris and first King of the
the French, not merely a capital, but France itself,
' its living heart and surest bulwark.'

The immediate instrument of so rapid and extra-
I ordinary an achievement was the Committee of
[ Public Safety. The French have never shown their
quick genius for organisation with more triumphant
vigour. While the Girondins were still powerful,
nine members of the Convention had been constituted
an executive committee, April 6, 1793. They were
in fact a kind of permanent cabinet, with practical
irresponsibility. In the summer of 1793 the number
was increased from nine to twelve, and these twelve
were the centre of the revolutionary government.
They fell into three groups. First, there were the
scientific or practical administrators, of whom the
most eminent was Carnot. Next came the directors
of internal policy, the pure revolutionists, headed by
Billaud de Varennes. Finally, there was a trio whose
business it was to translate action into the phrases of

1

ROBESPIERRE. 65

revolutionary policy. This famous group was Kobes-
pierre, Couthon, and Saint Just.

Besides the Committee of Public Safety there was1
another chief governmental committee, that of General
Security. Its functions were mainly connected with
the police, the arrests, and the prisons, but in all
serious affairs the two Committees deliberated in
common. There were also fourteen other groups
of various size, taken from the Convention ; they
applied themselves with admirable zeal, and usually
not with more zeal than skill, to schemes of public
instruction, of finance, of legislation, of the adminis-
tration of justice, and a host of other civil reforms,
of all of which Napoleon Bonaparte was bj^and bye.
to reap the credit. These bodies completed the civil
revolution, which the Constituent and the Legislative
Assemblies had left so mischievously incomplete
that, as soon as ever the Convention had assembled,
it was besieged by a host of petitioners praying them
to explain and to pursue the abolition of the old
feudal rights. Everything had still been left uncertain \
in men's minds, even upon that greatest of all the
revolutionary questions. The feudal division of the
committee of general legislation had in this eleventh
hour to decide innumerable issues, from those of the
widest practical importance, down to the prayer of a
remote commune to be relieved from the charge of
maintaining a certain mortuary lamp which had been
a matter of seignorial obligation. The work done by
the radical jurisconsults was never undone. It was

VOL. I. p

66 ROBESPIERRE.

the great and durable reward of the struggle. And
we have to remember that these industrious and
efficient bodies, as well as all othc r public bodies and
functionaries whatever, were placed by the definite
revolutionary constitution of 1793 under the direct
orders of the Committee of Public Safety.

It is hardly possible even r"w for any one who
exults in the memory of the gr/ at deliverance of a
brilliant and sociable people, to stand unmoved before
the walls of that palace wv ^h Philibert Delorme
reared for Catherine de' Medici, and which was
thrown into ruin by the madness of a band of
desperate men in our own days. Lewis had walked
forth from the Tuileries on the fatal morning of the
Tenth of August, holding his children by the hand,
and lightly noticing, as he traversed the gardens,
how early that year the leaves were falling. Lewis
had by this time followed the fallen leaves into
nothingness. The palace of the kings was now
styled the Palace of the Nation, and the new republic
carried on its work surrounded by the outward
associations of the old monarchy. The Convention
after the spring of 1793 held its sittings in what had
formerly been the palace theatre. Fierce men from
the Faubourgs of St. Antoine and St. Marceau, and
fiercer women from the markets, shouted savage
applause or menace from galleries, where not so long
ago the Italian buffoons had amused the perpetual
leisure of the finest ladies and proudest grandees of

ROBESPIEEKE. 67

France. The Committee of General Security occupied
the Pavilion de Marsan, looking over a dingy space
that the conqueror at Rivoli afterwards made the
most dazzling street in Europe. The Committee of
Public Safety sat in the Pavilion de Flore, at the
opposite end of the Tuileries on the river bank. The
approaches were protected by guns and by a body-
guard, while inside Jiere flitted to and fro a cloud of
familiars, who hav b t compared by the enemies of
the great Committee ';o the mutes of the court of the
Grand Turk. A.*y one who had business with this
awful body had to grope his way along gloomy
corridors, that were dimly lighted by a single lamp
at either end. The room in which the Committee
sat round a table of green cloth was incongruously
gay with the clocks, the bronzes, the mirrors, the
tapestries, of the ruined court. The members met
at eight in the morning and worked until one ; from
one to four they attended the sitting of the Conven-
tion. In the evening they met again, and usually
sat until night was far advanced. It was no wonder
if their hue became cadaverous, their eyes hollow and
bloodshot, their brows stern, their glance preoccupied
and sinister. Between ten and eleven every evening
a sombre piece of business was transacted, which has
half effaced in the memory of posterity all the heroic
industry of the rest of the twenty-four hours. It
was then that Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor,
brought an account of his day's labour; how the
revolutionary tribunal was working, how many had

68 ROBESPIEMIE.

been convicted and how many acquitted, how large
or how small had been the batch of the guillotine
since the previous night. Across the breadth of the
gardens, beyond their trees and fountains, stood the
Monster itself, with its cruel symmetry, its colour as
of the blood of the dead, its unheeding knife, neutral
as the Fates.

Kobespierre has been held responsible for all the
J violences of the revolutionary government, and his
I position on the Committee appeared to be exceedingly
j strong. It was, however, for a long time much less
' strong in reality than it seemed : all depended upon
successfully playing off one force against another, and
at the same time maintaining himself at the centre
j of the see -saw. Robespierre was the literary and
j rhetorical member of the band; he was the author
/ of the strident manifestoes in which Europe listened
with exasperation to the audacious hopes and unfalter-
ing purpose of the new France. This had the effect
of investing him in the eyes of foreign nations with
supreme and undisputed authority over the govern-
ment. The truth is, that Robespierre was both dis-
liked and despised by his colleagues. They thought
of him as a mere maker of useful phrases ; he in turn
secretly looked down upon them, as the man who
has a doctrine and a system in his head always looks
down upon the man who lives from hand to mouth.
If the Committee had been in the place of a govern-
ment which has no opposition to fear, Robespierre
would have been one of its least powerful members.

ROBESPIERRE. 69

But although the government was strong, there were j
at least three potent elements of opposition even I
within the ranks of the dominant revolutionary party J
itself.

Three bodies in Paris were, each of them, the \
centre of an influence that might at any moment j
become the triumphant rival of the Committee of ;
Public Safety. These bodies were, first, the Oonven- \
tion ; second, the Commune of Paris ; and thirdly,
the Jacobin Club. The jealousy thus existing outside
the Committee would have made any failure instantly
destructive. At one moment, at the end of 1793, it
was only the surrender of Toulon that saved the
Committee from a hostile motion in the Convention,
and such a motion would have sent half of them to
the guillotine. They were reviled by the extreme
party who ruled at the Town Hall for not carrying
the policy of extermination far enough. They were
reproached by Danton and his powerful section for
carrying that policy too far. They were discredited
by the small band of intriguers, like Bazire, who
identified government with peculation. Finally, they
were haunted by the shadow of a fear, which events
were by and by to prove only too substantial, lest one
of their military agents on the frontier should make
himself their master. The key to the struggle of the
factions between the winter of 1793 and the revolu-
tion of the summer of 1794 is the vigorous resolve of
the governing Committees not to part with power.
The drama is one of the most exciting in the history

70 ROBESPIERRE.

of faction ; it abounds in rapid turns and unexpected
shifts, upon which the student may spend many a
day and many a night, and after all he is forced to
leave off in despair of threading an accurate way
through the labyrinth of passion and intrigue. The
broad traits of the situation, however, are tolerably
| simple. The difficulty was to find a principle of
[government which the people could be induced to
accept. 'The rights of men and the new principles
of liberty and equality,' Burke said, ' were very un-
handy instruments for those who wished to establish
a system of tranquillity and order. The factions,' he
added with fierce sarcasm, 'were to accomplish the
purposes of order, morality, and submission to the
laws, from the principles of atheism, profligacy, and
sedition. They endeavoured to establish distinctions,
by the belief of which they hoped to keep the spirit
of murder safely bottled up and sealed for their owu
purposes, without endangering themselves by the
fumes of the poison which they prepared for their
enemies.' This is a ferocious and passionate version,
but it is substantially not an unreal account of the
position.

j Upon one point all parties agreed, and that was

/the necessity of founding the government upon force,

j and force naturally meant Terror. Their plea was

I that of Dido to Ilioneus and the stormbeaten sons of

Dardanus, when they complained that her people had

drawn the sword upon them, and barbarously denied

the hospitality of the sandy shore : —

ROBESPIERRE. 71

Res dura et regni novitas me talia cogunt
Moliri.

And that pithy chapter in Machiavelli's Prince which
treats of cruelty and clemency, and whether it be
better to be loved or feared, anticipates the defence
of the Terrorists, in the maxim that for a new prince
it is impossible to avoid the name of cruel, because
all new states abound in many perils. The difference
arose on the question when Terror should be con-
sidered to have done as much of its work as it could
be expected to do. This difference again was con-
nected with difference of conception as to the type of
the society which was ultimately to emerge from the
existing chaos. Billaud-Varennes, the guiding spirit
of the Committees, was without any conception of
this kind. He was a man of force pure and simple.
Danton was equally untouched by dreams of social
transformation ; his philosophy, so far as he had a
definite philosophy, was, in spite of one or two in-
consistent utterances, materialistic : and materialism,
when it takes root in a sane, perspicacious, and
indulgent character, as in the case of Danton, and, to
take a better-known example, in the case of Jeffer-
son, usually leads to a sound and positive theory of
politics ; chimeras have no place in it, though a
rational social hope has the first place of all. Neither
Danton nor Billaud expected a millennium ; their
only aim was to shape France into a coherent political
personality, and the war between them turned upon
the policy of prolonging the Terror after the frontiers

72 ROBESPIERRE.

had been saved and the risings in the provinces put
down. There were, however, two parties who took
the literature of the century in earnest ; they thought
that the hour had struck for translating, one of them,
the sentimentalism of Rousseau, the other of them,
the rationality of Voltaire and Diderot, into terms of
politics that should form the basis of a new social life.
The strife between the faction of Robespierre and the
faction of Chaumette was the reproduction, under the
shadow of the guillotine, of the great literary strife
of a quarter of a century before between Jean Jacques
and the writers whom he contemptuously styled
Holbachians. The battle of the books had become a
battle between bands of infuriated men. The struggle
between Hebert and Chaumette and the Common
Council of Paris on the one part, and the Committee
and Robespierre on the other, was the concrete form
of the deepest controversy that lies before modern
society. Can the social union subsist without a belief
in God 1 Chaumette answered Yes, and Robespierre
!j cried No. Robespierre followed Rousseau An think-
/ ing that any one who should refuse to recognise the
I! existence of a God, should be exiled as a monster
' devoid of the faculties of virtue and sociability.
Chaumette followed Diderot, and Diderot told Samuel
Romilly in 1783 that belief in God, as well as submis-
sion to kings, would be at an end all over the world
in a very few years. The Hebertists might have
taken for their motto Diderot's shocking couplet, if
they could have known it, about using

ROBESPIEKEE. 73

Les entrailles du pvetre
Au defaut d'un cordon pour etrangler les rois.

The theists and the atheists, Chaumette and Eobes-
pierre, each of them accepted the doctrine that it was
in the power of the armed legislator to impose any
belief and any rites he pleased upon the country at
his feet. The theism or the atheism of the new
France depended, as they thought, on the issue of
the war for authority between the Hebertists in the
Common Council of Paris, and the Committee of
Public Safety. That was the religious side of the
attitude of the government to the opposition, and
it is the side that possesses most historic interest.
Billaud cared very little for religion in any way ; his
quarrel with the Commune and with H6bert was
political. What Eobespierre's drift appears to have
been, was to use the political animosity of the Com-
mittee as a means of striking foes, against whom his
own animosity was not only political but religious
also.

It would doubtless show a very dull apprehension
of the violence and confusion of the time, to suppose
that even Eobespierre, with all his love for concise
theories, was accustomed to state his aim to himself
with the definite neatness in which it appears when
reduced to literary statement. Pedant as he was, he
was yet enough of a politician to see the practical
urgency of restoring material order, whatever spiritual
belief or disbelief might accompany it. The prospect
of a rallying point for material order was incessantly

74 ROBESPIERRE.

changing; and Robespierre turned to different quarters
in search of it almost from week to week. He was
only able to exert a certain limited authority over his
colleagues in the government, by virtue of his influence
over the various sections of possible opposition, and
this was a moral, and not an official, influence. It
was acquired not by marked practical gifts, for in
truth Robespierre did not possess them, but by his
good character, by his rhetoric, and by the skill with
which he kept himself prominently before the public
eye. The effective seat of his power, notwithstanding
many limits and incessant variations, was the Jacobin
Club. There a speech from him threw his listeners
into ecstasies, that have been disrespectfully compared
to the paroxysms of Jansenist convulsionaries, or the
hysterics of Methodist negroes on a cotton plantation.
We naturally think of those grave men who a few
years before had founded the republic in America.
Jefferson served with Washington in the Virginian
legislature and with Franklin in Congress, and he
afterwards said that be never heard either of them
speak ten minutes at a time; while John Adams
declared that he never heard Jefferson utter three
sentences together. Of Robespierre it is stated on
good authority that for eighteen months there was
not a single evening on which he did not make to the
assembled Jacobins at least one speech, and that never
a short one.

Strange as it may seem, Robespierre's credit with
this grim assembly was due to his truly Philistine

ROBESPIERRE. 75

respectability and to his literary faculty. He figured
as the philosopher and bookman of the party : the
most iconoclastic politicians are usually willing to
respect the scholar, provided they are sure of his being
on their side. Robespierre had from the first discoun- j
tenanced the fantastic caprices of some too excitable
allies. He distrusted the noisy patriots of the middle \
class, who curried favour with the crowd by clothing \
themselves in coarse garments, clutching a pike, and J
donning the famous cap of red woollen, which had /
been the emblem of the emancipation of a slave in'
ancient Rome. One night at the Jacobin Club, Robes-
pierre mounted the tribune, dressed with his usual
elaborate neatness, and still wearing powder in his
hair. An onlooker unceremoniously planted on the
orator's head the red cap demanded by revolutionary
etiquette. Robespierre threw the sacred symbol on
the ground with a severe air, and then proceeded with
a discourse of much austerity. Not that he was
averse to a certain seemly decoration, or to the em-
bodiment of revolutionary sentiment by means of a
symbolism that strikes our cooler imagination as rather
puerile. He was as ready as others to use the arts of
the theatre for the liturgy of patriots. One of the
most touching of all the minor dramatic incidents of
the Revolution was the death of Barra This was a
child of thirteen who enrolled himself as a drummer,
and marched with the Blues to suppress the rebel
Whites in La Vendue. One day he advanced too
close to the enemy's post, intrepidly beating the

76 KOBESPIERRE.

charge. He was surrounded, but the peasant soldiers
were loth to strike. ' Cry Long live the King /' they
shouted, 'or else death !' 'Long live the Republic !'
was the poor little hero's answer, as a ball pierced his
heart. Robespierre described the incident to the
Convention, and amid prodigious enthusiasm de-
manded that the body of the young martyr of liberty
should be transported to the Pantheon with special
pomp, and that David, the artist of the Revolution,
should be charged with the duty of devising and
embellishing the festival. As it happened, the arrange-
ments were made for the ceremony to take place on
the Tenth of Thermidor — a day on which Robespierre
and all Paris were concerned about a celebration of
bloodier import. Thermidor, hoAvever, was still far
off; and the red sun of Jacobin enthusiasm seemed
as if it would shine unclouded for ever.

Even at the Jacobins, however, popular as he was,
Robespierre felt every instant the necessity of walking
cautiously. He was as far removed as possible from
that position of Dictator which some historians with
a wearisome iteration persist in ascribing to him, even
at the moment when they are enumerating the defeats
which the party of Hebert was able to inflict upon
him in the very bosom of the Mother Club itself.
They make him the sanguinary dictator in one sen-
tence, and the humiliated intriguer in the next. The
latter is much the more correct account of the two, if
we choose to call a man an intriguer who was honestly
anxious to suppress what he considered a wicked

ROBESPIERRE.

77

faction, and yet had need of some dexterity to keep
his own head upon his shoulders.

In the winter of 1793 the Municipal party, guided
by Hebert and Chaumette, made their memorable
attempt to extirpate Christianity in France. The
doctrine of D'Holbach's supper-table had for a short
space the arm of flesh and the sword of the temporal
power on its side. It was the first appearance of
dogmatic atheism in Europe as a political force. This
makes it one of the most remarkable moments in the
Revolution, just as it makes the Revolution itself the
most remarkable moment in modern history. The
first political demonstration of atheism was attended
by some of the excesses, the folly, the extravagances
that stained the growth of Christianity. On the
whole it is a very mild story compared with the)
atrocities of the Jewish records or the crimes of^
Catholicism. The worst charge against the party of
Chaumette is that they were intolerant, and the
charge is deplorably true ; but this charge cannot lie
in the mouth of persecuting churches.

Historical recriminations, however, are not very
edifying. It is perfectly fair when Catholics talk of
the atheist Terror, to rejoin that the retainers of
Anjou and Montpensier slew more men and women
on the first day of the Saint Bartholomew than
perished in Paris through the Years I. and II. But
the retort does us no good beyond the region of
dialectic ; it rather brings us down to the level of the

78 ROBESPIERRE.

poor sectaries whom it crushes. Let us raise ourselves
into clearer air. The fault of the atheist is that they
knew no better than to borrow the maxims of the
churchmen ; and even those who agree with the
dogmatic denials of the atheists — if such there be —
ought yet to admit that the mere change from
superstition to reason is a small gain, if the conclusions
of reason are still to be enforced by the instruments
of superstition. Our opinions are less important than
the spirit and temper with which they possess us, and
even good opinions are worth very little unless we
hold them in a broad, intelligent, and spacious way.
Now some of the opinions of Chaumette were full of
enlightenment and hope. He had a generous and
vivid faith in humanity, and he showed the natural
effect of abandoning belief in another life by his
energetic interest in arrangements for improving the
lot of man in this life. But it would be far better to
share the superstitious opinions of a virtuous and
benignant priest like the Bishop in Victor Hugo's
MisSrables, than to hold those good opinions of Chau-
mette as he held them, with a rancorous intolerance,
a reckless disregard of the rights and feelings of
others, and a shallow forgetfulness of all that great
and precious part of our natures that lies out of the
immediate domain of the logical understanding. One
can understand how an honest man would abhor the
Fdarkness and tyranny of the Church. But then to
borrow the same absolutism in the interests of new
light, was inevitably to bring the new light into the

ROBESHERRE. 79

same abhorrence as had befallen the old system of
darkness. And this is exactly what happened. In
every family where a mother sought to have her child
baptized, or where sons and daughters sought to have
the dying spirit of the old consoled by the last sacra-
ment, there sprang up a bitter enemy to the govern-
ment which had closed the churches and proscribed
the priests.

How could a society whose spiritual life had been
nourished in the solemn mysticism of the Middle Ages,
suddenly turn to embrace a gaudy paganism 1 The
common self-respect of humanity was outraged by
apostate priests who, whether under the pressure of
fear of Chaumette, or in a very superfluity of folly
and ectasy of degradation, hastened to proclaim the
charlatanry of their past hives, as they filed before
the Convention, led by the Archbishop of Paris, and
accompanied by rude acolytes bearing piles of the
robes and the vessels of silver and gold with which
they had once served their holy offices. 'Our
enemies,' Voltaire had said, 'have always on their
side the fat of the land, the sword, the strong box,
and the canaille.' For a moment all these forces were
on the other side, and it is deplorable to think that
they were as much abused by their new masters as
by the old. The explanation is that the destructive
party had been brought up in the schools of the
ecclesiastical party, and their work was a mere out-
break of mutiny, not a grave and responsible attempt
to lead France to a worthier faith. If, as Chaumette

80 ROBESPIERRE.

believed, mankind are the only Providence of men,
surely in that faith more than in any other are we
bound to be very solicitous not to bring the violent
hand of power on any of the spiritual acquisitions of
the race, and very patient in dealing with the slowness
of the common people to leave their outworn creeds.
Instead of defying the Church by the theatrical
march of the Goddess of Reason under the great
sombre arches of the Cathedral of Our Lady,-
Chaumette should have found comfort in a firn.
calculation of the conditions. ' You,' he might have
said to the priests, — 'you have so debilitated the
minds of men and women by your promises and your
dreams, that many a generation must come and go
before Europe can throw off the yoke of your super-
stition. But we promise you that they shall be
generations of strenuous battle. We give you all
the advantages that you can get from the sincerity
and pious worth of the good and simple among you.
We give you all that the bad among you -may get by
resort to the poisoned weapons of your profession and
its traditions, — its bribes to mental indolence, its
hypocritical affectations in the pulpit, its tyranny in
the closet, its false speciousness in the world, its
menace at the deathbed. With all these you may do
your worst, and still humanity will escape you ; still
the conscience of the race will rise away from you ;
still the growth of brighter ideals and a nobler purpose
will go on, leaving ever further and further behind
them your dwarfed finality and leaden moveless

ROBESPIERRE. 81

stereotype. We shall pass you by on your flank ;
your fieriest darts will only spend themselves on air.
We will not attack you as Voltaire did ; we will not
exterminate you ; we shall explain you. History will
place your dogma in its class, above or below a
hundred competing dogmas, exactly as the naturalist
classifies his species. From being a conviction, it will
sink to a curiosity ; from being the guide to millions
of human lives, it will dwindle down to a chapter in
p book. As History explains your dogma, so Science
will dry it up; the conception of law will silently
make the conception of the daily miracle of your
altars seem impossible ; the mental climate will
gradually deprive your symbols of their nourishment,
and men will turn their backs on your system, not
because they have confuted it, but because, like
witchcraft or astrology, it has ceased to interest them.
The great ship of your Church, once so stout and fair
and well laden with good destinies, is become a
skeleton ship ; it is a phantom hulk, with warped
planks and sere canvas, and you who work it are no
more than ghosts of dead men, and at the hour when
you seerr to have reached the bay, down your ship
will sink like lead or like stone to the deepest
bottom.'

Alas, the speculation of the century had not rightly
attuned men's minds to this firm confidence in the
virtue of liberty, sounding like a bell through all dis-
tractions. None of these high things were said. The
temples were, closed, the sacred symbols defiled, the

vol. i. a

82 ROBESPIERRE.

priests maltreated, the worshippers dispersed. The
Commune of Paris imitated the policy of the King of
France who revoked the Edict of Nantes, and demo-
cratic atheism parodied the dragonnades of absolutist
Catholicism.

J Kobespierre was unutterably outraged by the pro-
/ ceedings of the atheists. They perplexed him as a
politician intent upon order, and they afflicted him
sorely as an ardent disciple of the Savoyard Vicar.
1 Hebert, however, was so strong that it needed some
courage to attack him, nor did Robespierre dare to
withstand him to the face. But he did not flinch
from making an energetic assault upon atheism and
the excesses of its partisans. His admirers usually
count his speech of the Twenty -first of November one
of the most admirable of his oratorical successes.
The Sphinx still sits inexorable at our gates, and his
words have lost none of their interest. 'Every
philosopher and every individual,' he -said, 'may
adopt whatever opinion he pleases about atheism.
Any one who wishes to make such an opinion into a
crime is an insensate; but the public man or the
legislator who should adopt such a system, would be
a hundred times more insensate still. The National
Convention abhors it. The Convention is not the
author of a scheme of metaphysics. It was not to no
purpose that it published the Declaration of the Rights
of Man in presence of the Supreme Being. I shall be
told perhaps that I have a narrow intelligence, that I

ROBESPIERRE. 83

am a man of prejudice, and a fanatic. I have already
said that I spoke neither as an individual nor as a
philosopher with a system, but as a representative of
the people. Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a great
being ivho watches over oppressed innocence and punishes
triumphant crime, is essentially the idea of the people.
This is the sentiment of Europe and the Universe ;
it is the sentiment of the French nation. That people I
is attached neither to priests, nor to superstition, nor \
to ceremonies ; it is attached only to worship in itself,
or in other words to the idea of an incomprehensible \
Power, the terror of wrongdoers, the stay and comfort J
of virtue, to which it delights to render words of /
homage that are all so many anathemas against in-
justice and triumphant crime.'

This is Kobespierre's favourite attitude, the priest
posing as statesman. Like others, he declares the
Supreme Power incomprehensible, and then describes
him in terms of familiar comprehension. He first
declares atheism an open choice, and then he brands
it with the most odious epithet in the accepted voca-
bulary of the hour. Danton followed practically the j
same line, though saying much less about it. 'If '
Greece,' he said in the Convention, ' had its Olympian
games; France too shall solemnise her sans-culottid
days. The people will have high festivals ; they will
offer incense to the Supreme Being, to the master of
nature ; for we never intended to annihilate the reign
of superstition in order to set up the reign of
atheism. ... If we have not honoured the priest of

84 ROBESPIERRE.

error and fanaticism, neither do we wish to honour
the priest of incredulity : we wish to serve the people.
I demand that there shall be an end of these anti-
religious masquerades in the Convention.'

There was an end of the masquerading, but the
Hebertists still kept their ground. Dbmton, Robes-
pierre, and the Committee were all equallyrmpotent
against them for some months longer. The revolu-
tionary force had been too strong to be resisted by
any government since the Paris insurgents had carried
both King and Assembly in triumph from Versailles in
the October of 1789. It was now too strong for those
who had begun to strive with all their might to build
a new government out of the agencies that had shat-
tered the old to pieces. For some months the battle
which had been opened by Robespierre's remonstrance
against atheistic intolerance, degenerated into a series
of masked skirmishes. The battle-ground of rival
principles was overshadowed by the baleful wings of
the genius of demonic Hate. Vexilla regis prodeunt
infemi; the banners of the King of the Pit came
forth. The scene at the Cordeliers for a time became
as frantic as a Council of the Early Church settling
the true composition of the Holy Trinity. Or it
recalls the fierce and bloody contentions between
Demos and Oligarchy in an old Greek town. We
think of the day in the harbour of Corcyra when the
Athenian admiral who had come to deliver the people,
sailed out to meet the Spartan enemy, and on turning
round to see if his Corcyrean allies were following,

ROBESPIERRE. 85

saw them following indeed, but the crew of every
ship striving in enraged conflict with one another.
Collot D'Herbois had come back in hot haste from
Lyons, where, along with Fouch6, he had done his
best to carry out the decree of the Convention, that
not one stone of the city should be left on the top of
another, and that even its very name should cease
from the lips of men. Carrier was recalled from
Nantes, where his feats of ingenious massacre had
rivalled the exploits of the cruellest and maddest of
the Roman Emperors. The presence of these men of
blood gave new courage and resolution to the H6ber-
tists. Though the alliance was informal, yet as against
Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and the rest of the In-
dulgents, as well as against Robespierre, they made
common cause.

Camille Desmoulins attacked Hubert in successive
numbers of a journal that is perhaps the one truly
literary monument of this stage of the revolution.
Hubert retaliated by impugning the patriotism of
Desmoulins in the Club, and the unfortunate wit,
notwithstanding the efforts of Robespierre on his
behalf, was for a while turned out of the sacred pre-
cincts. The power of the extreme faction was shown
in relation to other prominent members of the party
whom they loved to stigmatise by the deadly names
of Indulgent and Moderantist. Even Danton himself
was attacked (December 1793), and the integrity of
his patriotism brought into question. Robespierre
made an energetic defence of his great rival in the

86 ROBESPIERRE.

hierarchy of revolution, and the defence saved Danton
from the mortal ignominy of expulsion from the com-
munion of the orthodox On the other hand,
Anacharsis Clootz, that guileless ally of the party of
delirium, was less fortunate. Robespierre assailed
the cosmopolitan for being a German baron, for having
four thousand pounds a year, and for striking his sans-
culottism some notes higher than the regular pitch.
Even M. Louis Blanc calls this an iniquity, and sets
it down as the worst page in Robespierre's life.
Others have described Robespierre as struck at this
time by the dire malady of kings — hatred of the Idea.
It seems, however, a hard saying that devotion to the
Idea is to extinguish common sense. Clootz, not-
withstanding his simple and disinterested character,
and his possession of some rays of the modern
illumination, was one of the least sane of all the men
who in the exultation of their silly gladness were
suddenly caught up by that great wheel of fire. All
we can say is that Robespierre's bitter, demeanour
towards Clootz was ungenerous ; but then this is
only natural in him. Robespierre often clothed cool
policy in the semblance of clemency, but I cannot
hear in any phrase he ever used, or see in any measure
he ever proposed, the mark of true generosity ; of
kingliness of spirit, not a trace. He had no element
of ready and cordial propitiation, an element that can
never be wanting in the greatest leaders in time of
storm. If he resisted the atrocious proposals to put
Madame Elizabeth to death, he was thinking not of

ROBESPIERKE. 87

mercy or justice, but of the mischievous effect that
her execution would have upon the public opinion of
Europe, and he was so unmanly as to speak of her as
la mqrrisdble sozur de Louis XVI. Such a phrase is
the disclosure of an abject stratum in his soul.

Yet this did not prevent him from seeing and
denouncing the bloody extravagances of the Proconsuls,
the representatives of Parisian authority in the pro-
vinces ; nor from standing firm against the execution
of the Seventy-Three, who had been bold enough to
question the purgation of the National Convention
on the Thirty-first of May. But the return of Collot
d'Herbois made the situation more intricate. Collot
was by his position the ally of Billaud, and to attack
him, therefore, was to attack the most powerful
member of the Committee of Public Safety. Billaud
was too formidable. He was always the impersona-
tion of the ruder genius of the Revolution, and the
incarnation of the philosophy of the Terror, not as
a delirium, but as a piece of deliberate policy. His
pale, sober, and concentrated physiognomy seemed a
perpetual menace. He had no gifts of speech, but
his silence made people shudder, like the silence of
the thunder when the tempest rages at its height.
It was said by contemporaries that if Vadier was
a hysena, Barere a jackal, and Robespierre a cat,
Billaud was a tiger.

The cat perceived that he was in danger of not
having the tiger, jackal, and hyoena, on his side.
Robespierre, in whom spasmodical courage and timid-

88 ROBESPIERRE.

ity ruled by rapid turns, began to suspect that he
had been premature ; and a convenient illness, which
some suppose to have been feigned, excused his
withdrawal for some weeks from a scene where he
felt that he could no longer see clear. We cannot
doubt that both he and Danton were perfectly assured
that the anarchic party must unavoidably roll headlong
into the abyss. But the hour of doom was uncertain.
To make a mistake in the right moment, to hurry
Ithe crisis, was instant death. Robespierre was a
| more adroit calculator than Danton. We must not
confound his thin and querulous reserve with that
stout and deep-browed patience, which may imply as
superb a fortitude, and may demand as much iron
control in a statesman, as the most heroic exploits
of political energy. But his habit of waiting on
force, instead of, like the other, taking the initiative
with force, had trained his sight. The mixture of
astuteness with his scruple, of egoistic policy with his
stiffness for doctrine, gave him an advantage over
Danton, that made his life worth exactly three
months' more purchase than Danton's. It has been
said that Spinozism or Transcendentalism in poetic
production becomes Machiavellism in reflection : for
the same reasons we may always expect sentimentalism
in theory to become under the pressure of action a
very self- protecting guile. Robespierre's mind was
not rich nor flexible enough for true statesmanship,
and it is a grave mistake to suppose that the various
cunning tacks in which his career abounds, were any

ROBESPIERRE. 89

sign of genuine versatility or resource or political
growth and expansion. They were, in fact, the
resort of a man whose nerves were weaker than his
volition. Eobespierre was a kind of spinster. Force
of head did not match his spiritual ambition. He
was not, we repeat, a coward in any common sense ;
in that case he would have remained quiet among the
croaking frogs of the Marsh, and by and by have come
to hold a portfolio under the first Consul. He did
not fear death, and he envied with consuming envy
those to whom nature had given the qualities of
initiative. But his nerves always played him false.
The consciousness of having to resolve to take a
decided step alone, was the precursor of a fit of
trembling. His heart did not fail, but he could not
control the parched voice, nor the twitching features,
not the ghastly palsy of inner misgiving. In this
respect Eobespierre recalls a more illustrious man ;
we think of Cicero tremblingly calling upon the
Senate to decide for him whether he should order
the execution of the Catilinarian conspirators. It is
to be said, however, in his favour that he had the
art, which Cicero lacked, to hide his pusillanimity.
Eobespierre knew himself, and did his best to keep
his own secret.

His absence during the final crisis of the anarchic
party allowed events to ripen, without committing
him to that initiative in dangerous action which he
had dreaded on the Tenth of August, as he dreaded
it on every other decisive day of this burning time.

90 ROBESPIERRE.

The party of the Commune became more and more

daring in their invectives against the Convention and

the Committees. At length they proclaimed open

insurrection. But Paris was cold, and opinion was

I divided. In the night of the Thirteenth of March,

( Hebert, Chaumette, Clootz, were arrested. The next

day Eobespierre recovered sufficiently to appear at

the Jacobin Club. He joined his colleagues of the

Committee of Public Safety in striking the blow.

/On the Twenty-fourth of March the Ultra-Revolu-

/ tionist leaders were beheaded.

I The first bloody breach in the Jacobin ranks was
speedily followed by the second. The Right wing of
the opposition to the Committee soon followed the
Left down the ways to dusty death, and the execution
of the Anarchists only preceded by a week the arrest
of the Moderates. When the seizure of Danton had
once before been discussed in the Committee, Robes-
pierre resisted the proposal violently. We have
already seen how he defended Danton at the Jacobin
Club, when the Club underwent the process of
purification in the winter. What produced this
I sudden tack? How came Robespierre to assent in
! March to a violence which he had angrily discoun-
' tenanced in February? There had been no change
in the policy or attitude of Danton himself. The
military operations against the domestic and foreign
enemies were no sooner fairly in the way of success,
than Danton began to meditate in serious earnest the
consolidation of a republican system of law and

ROBESPIEKRE. 91

justice. He would fain have stayed the Terror.
'Let us leave something,' he said, 'to the guillotine
of opinion.' He aided, no douht, in the formation of
the Kevolutionary Tribunal, but this was exactly in
harmony with his usual policy of controlling popular
violence without alienating the strength of popular
sympathy. The process of the tribunal was rough
and summary, but it was fairer — until Robespierre's
Law of Prairial — than people usually suppose, and it
was the very temple of the goddess of Justice herself
compared with the September massacres. 'Let us
prove ourselves terrible,' Danton said, ' to relieve the
people from the necessity of being so.' His activity
had been incessant in urging and superintending the
great levies against the foreigner ; he had gone
repeatedly on distant and harassing expeditions, as
the representative of the Convention at the camps on
the frontier. In the midst of all this he found time'
to press forward measures for the instruction of the \
young, and for the due appointment of judges, and
his head was full of ideas for the construction of a
permanent executive council. It was this which
made him eager for a cessation of the method of
Terror, and it was this which made the Committee
of Public Safety his implacable enemy. /

Why, then, did Eobespierre, who also passed as a
man of order and humanity, not continue to support
Danton after the suppression of the Hebertists, as he
had supported him before 1 The common and facile
answer is that he was moved by a malignant desire

92 ROBESPIERRE.

I to put a rival out of the way. On the whole, the
■ evidence seems to support Napoleon's opinion that .
Robespierre was incapable of voting for the death of
anybody in the world on grounds of personal-enmity.
And his acquiescence in the ruin of Danton is intelli-
gible enough on the grounds of selfish policy. The"*
Committee hated Danton for the good reason that he
had openly attacked them, and his cry for clemency .
was an inflammatory and dangerous protest against
their system. Now Robespierre, rightly or wrongly,
had made up his mind that the Committee was the
instrument by which, and which only, he could work
out his own vague schemes of power and reconstruc-
tion. And, in any case, how could he resist the Com-
mittee 1 The famous insurrectionary force of Paris,
which-. Danton had been the first to organise against
a government, had just been chilled by the fall of the
Hebertists. Least of all could this force be relied
upon to rise in defence of the very chief whose every
word for many weeks past had been a protest against
the Communal leaders. In separating himself from
the Ultras, Danton had cut off the great reservoir of
his peculiar strength.

It may be said that the Convention was the proper
centre of resistance to the designs of the Committee,
and that if Danton and Robespierre had united their
forces in the Convention they would have defeated
Billaud and his allies. This seems to us more than
doubtful. The Committee had acquired an immense
preponderance over the Convention. They had been

ROBESPIERRE. 93

eminently successful in the immense tasks imposed
upon them. They had the prestige not only of being
the government — so great a thing in a country that
had just~emerged from the condition of a centralised
monarchy; they had also the prestige of being a
government that had done its work triumphantly.!
We are now in March. In July we shall find that
Robespierre adopted the very policy that we are now
discussing, of playing off the Convention against the
Committee. In July that policy ended in his head'
long fall. Why should it have been any more suc-
cessful four months earlier 1

What we may say is, that Robespierre was bound
in all morality to defend Danton in the Convention
at every hazard. Possibly so ; but then to run risks
for chivalry's sake was not in Robespierre's nature,
and no man can climb out beyond the limitations of
his own character. His narrow head and thin blood
and instable nerve, his calculating humour and his
frigid egoism, disinclined him to all games of chance.
His apologists have sought to put a more respectable t
colour on his abandonment of Danton. The precisian, \
they say, disapproved of Danton's lax and heedless
courses. Danton said to him one day : — ' What do I
care 1 Public opinion is a strumpet, and posterity a
piece of nonsense.' How should the puritanical
lawyer endure such cynicism as this 1 And Danton
delighted in inflicting these coarse shocks. Again,
Danton had given various gross names of contempt to
Saint Just. Was Robespierre not to feel insults

{

/

94 . ROBESPIERRE.

offered to the ablest and most devoted of his lieu-
tenants 1 What was more important than all, the
acclamations with which the partisans of reaction
greeted the fall of the Ultras, made it necessary to
give instant and unmistakable notice to the foes of the
Revolution that the goddess of the scorching eye and
fiery hand still grasped the axe of her vengeance.

These are pleas invented after the fact. All goes
to show that Eobespierre was really moved by nothing
more than his invariable dread of being left behind,
of finding himself on the weaker side, of not seeming
practical and political enough. And having made up
/ his mind that the stronger party was bent on the
! destruction of the Dantonists, he became fiercer than
I Billaud himself. It is constantly seen that the
waverer, of nervous atrabiliar constitution, no sooner
overcomes the agony of irresolution, than he flings
himself on his object with a vindictive tenacity that
seems to repay him for all the moral humiliation in-
flicted on him by his stifled doubts. He redeems the
slowness of his approach by the fury of his spring.
' Robespierre,' says M. d'Hericault, ' precipitated him-
0 self to the front of the opinion that was yelling
against his friends of yesterday. In order to keep
his usual post in the van of the Revolution, in order
to secure the advantage to his own popularity of an
execution which the public voice seemed to demand,
he came forward as the author of that execution,
though only the day before he had hesitated about
its utility, and though it was, in truth far less use-

ROBESPIERRE. 95

ful to him than it proved to be to his future anta-
gonists.'

Robespierre first alarmed Danton's friends by
assuming a certain icy coldness of manner, and by
some menacing phrases about the faction of the so-
called Moderates. Danton had gone, as he often did,
to his native village of Arcis-sur-Aube, to seek repose
and a little clearness of sight in the night that wrapped
him about. He was devoid of personal ambition ; he
never had any humour for mere factious struggles.
His, again, was the temperament of violent force, and
in such types the reaction is always tremendous. The
indomitable activity of the last twenty months had
bred weariness of spirit. The nemesis of a career of
strenuous Will in large natures is apt to be a sudden
sense of the irony of things. In Danton, as with
Byron it happened afterwards, the vehemence of the
revolutionary spirit was touched by this desolating
irony. His friends tried to rouse him. It is not
clear that he could have done anything. The balance
of force, after the suppression of the Hebertists, was
irretrievably against him, as calculation had already
revealed to Robespierre.

There are various stories of the pair having met
at dinner almost on the eve of Danton's arrest, and
parting with sombre disquietude on both sides. The
interview, with its champagne, its interlocutors, its
play of sinister repartee, may possibly have taken
place, but the alleged details are plainly apocryphal.
After all, 'Religion ist in der Thiere Trieb,' says

96 ROBESPIERRE.

Wallenstein ; 'the very savage drinks not with the
victim, into whose breast he means to p1 .ge a sword.'
Danton was warned that Eobespierre was plotting
his arrest. ' If I thought he had the bare idea,' said
Danton with something of Gargantuan hyperbole, 'I
would eat his bowels out.' Such was the disdain
with which the 'giant of the mighty lu^ and bold
emprise' thought of our meagre -hearted pedant.
The truth is thai ;n the stormy and distracted times
of politics, and perhaps in all times, contempt is a
dangerous luxury. A man may be a very poor
creature, and still have a faculty for mischief. And
Robespierre had this faculty in the case of Danton.
With singular baseness, he handed over to Saint Just
a collection of notes, to serve as material for the
indictment which Saint Just was to present to the
Convention. They comprised everything that sus-
picion could interpret malignantly, from the most
conspicuous acts of Danton's public life, down to the
casual freedom of private discourse.

Another infamy was to follow. After the arrest,
and on the proceedings to obtain the assent of the
Convention to the trial of Danton and others of its
members, one only of their friends had the courage
to rise and demand that they should be heard at the
bar. Robespierre burst out in cold rage ; he asked
whether they had undergone so many heroic sacrifices,
ting among them these acts of ' painful severity,'
only to fall under the yoke of a band of domineering
intriguers ; and he cried out impatiently that they

▲ whet

ROBESPIERRE. 97

would brook no claim of privilege, and suffer no
rotten idol. The word was felicitously chosen, for
the Convention dreaded to have its independence
suspected, and it dreaded this all tho more because
at this time its independence did not really exist.
The vote against Danton was unanimous, and the fact
that it was *o is the deepest stain on the fame of this
assembly. On the afternoon of the Sixteenth Ger-
minal (April 5, 1794) Paris in anr_.ement and some
stupefaction saw the once-dreaded Titan of the Moun-
tain fast bound in the tumbril, and faring towards
the sharp-clanging knife. ' I leave it all in a frightful
welter,' Danton is reported to have said. 'Not a
man of them has an idea of government. Eobespierre
will follow me ; he is dragged down by me. Ah,
better be a poor fisherman than meddle with the
governing of men !'

Let us pause for a moment over a calmer remini-
scence. This was the very day on which the virtuous
and high-minded Condorcet quitted the friendly roof
that for nine months had concealed him from the
search of proscription. The same week he was
found dead in his prison. While Danton was storm-
ing with impotent thunder before the tribunal, Con-
dorcet was writing those closing words of his Sketch
of Human Progress, which are always so full of %
strength and edification. 'How this picture of'trfe
human race freed from all its fetters, — withdrawn
from the empire of chance, as from that of the enemies

V( L. I. H

98 ROBESPIERRE.

of progress, and walking with firm and assured step
in the way of truth, of virtue, and happiness, presents
to the philosopher a sight that consoles him for the
errors, the crimes, the injustice, with which the earth
is yet stained, and of which he is not seldom the
victim ! It is in the contemplation of this picture
that he receives the reward of his efforts for the pro-
gress of reason, for the defence of liberty. He
ventures to link them with the eternal chain of the
destinies of man : it is there he finds the true recom-
pense of virtue, the pleasure of having done a lasting
good ; fate can no longer undo it, by any disastrous
compensation that shall restore prejudice and bondage.
This contemplation is for him a refuge, into which
the recollection of his persecutors can never follow
him ; in which, living in thought with man reinstated
in the rights and the dignity of his nature, he forgets
man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear,
by envy : it is here that he truly abides with his
fellows, in an elysium that his reason has known how
to create for itself, and that his love for humanity
adorns with all purest delights.'

In following the turns of the drama which was to
.end in the tragedy of Thermidor, we perceive that
'after the fall of the anarchists and the death of
Danton, the relations between Robespierre and the
Committees underwent a change. He, who had
hitherto been on the side of government, became in
turn an agency of opposition. He did this in the

ROBESPIERRE. 99

interest of ultimate stability, but the difference be-
tween the new position and the old is that he now
distinctly associated the idea of a stable republic with
the ascendency of his own religious conceptions.
How far the ascendency of his own personality was
involved, we have no means of judging. The vulgar
accusation against him is that he now deliberately
aimed at a dictatorship, and began to plot with that
end in view. It is always the most difficult thing in
the world to draw a line between mere arrogant
egoism on the one hand, and on the other the identi-
fication of a man's personal elevation with the success
of his public cause. The two ends probably become
mixed in his mind, and if the cause be a good one, it
is the height of pharisaical folly to quarrel with him,
because he desires that his authority and renown
shall receive some of the lustre of a far-shining
triumph. What we complain of in Napoleon Bona-
parte, for instance, is not that he sought power, but
that he sought it in the interests of a coarse, brutal,
and essentially unmeaning personal ambition. And
so of Robespierre. We need not discuss the charge
that he sought to make himself master. The import-
ant thing is that his mastery could have served no
great end for France ; that it would have been like
himself, poor, barren, and hopelessly mediocre. And
this would have been seen on every side. France
had important military tasks to perform before her
independence was assured. Robespierre hated war,
and was jealous of every victory. France was in

100 ROBESPIERRE.

urgent need of stable government, of new laws, of
/ordered institutions. Robespierre never said a word
i to indicate that he had a single positive idea in his
head on any of these great departments. And, more
than this, he was incapable of making use of men
who were more happily endowed than himself. He
had never mastered that excellent observation of De
Retz, that of all the qualities of a good party chief,
none is so indispensable as being able to suppress on
many occasions, and to hide on all, even legitimate
suspicions. He was corroded by suspicion, and this
paralyses able servants. Finally, Robespierre had no
imperial quality of soul, but only that very sorry
imitation of it, a lively irritability.

The base of Robespierre's schemes of social recon-
i struction now came clearly into view ; and what a
base ! An official Supreme Being, and a regulated
/ Terror. The one was to fill up the spiritual void, and
| the other to satisfy all the exigencies of temporal
(things. It is to the credit of Robespierre's perspicacity
j that he should have recognised the human craving for
I religion, but this credit is as naught when we contem-
plate the jejune thing that passed for religion in his
dim and narrow understanding. Rousseau had brought
a new soul into the eighteenth century by the Savoyard
Vicar's Profession of Faith, the most fervid and exalted
expression of emotional deism that religious literature
contains ; vague, irrational, incoherent, cloudy ; but
the clouds are suffused with glowing gold. When we
turn from that to the political version of it in Robes-

ROBESPIERRE. 101

pierre's discourse on the relations of religious and
moral ideas with republican principles, we feel as one
who revisits a landscape that had been made glorious
to him by a summer sky and fresh liquid winds from
the gates of the evening sun, only to find it dead
under a gray heaven and harsh blasts from the north-
east. Robespierre's words on the Supreme Being are
never a brimming stream of deep feeling ; they are a
literary concoction : never the self-forgetting expansion
of the religious soul, but only the composite of the
rhetorician. He thought he had a passion for religion ;
what he took for religion was little more than mental
decorum. We do not mean that he was insincere, or
that he was without a feeling for high things. But
here, as in all else, his aspiration was far beyond his\
faculty ; he yearned for great spiritual emotions, as j
he had yearned for great thoughts and great achieve-!
ments, but his spiritual capacity was as scanty and)
obscure as his intelligence. And where unkind Nature'
thus unequally yokes lofty objects in a man with a
short mental reach, she stamps him with the very
definition of mediocrity.

How can we speak with decent patience of a man
who seriously thought that he should conciliate the
conservative and theological elements of the society
at his feet, by such an odious opera-piece as the Feast
of the Supreme Being1? This was designed as a
triumphant ripost to the Feast of Reason, which
Chaumette and his friends had celebrated in the
winter. The energumens of the Goddess of Eeason

102 ROBESPIERRE.

had now been some weeks in their bloody graves ; by
this time, if they had given the wrong answer to the
supreme enigma, their eyes would perhaps be opened.
Robespierre persuaded the Convention to decree an
official recognition of the Supreme Being, and to attend
a commemorative festival in honour of their mystic
patron. He contrived to be chosen president for "the
decade in which the festival would fall. When the
day came (20th Prairial, June 8, 1794), he clothed
himself with more than even his usual care. As he
looked out from the windows of the Tuileries upon
the jubilant crowd in the gardens, he was intoxicated
with enthusiasm. ' 0 Nature,' he cried, ' how sublime
thy power, how full of delight ! How tyrants must
grow pale at the idea of such a festival as this ! ' In
pontifical pride he walked at the head of the procession,
with flowers and wheat-ears in his hand, to the sound
of chants and symphonies and choruses of maidens.
On the first of the great basins in the gardens, David,
the artist, had devised an allegorical structure for
which an inauspicious doom was prepared. Atheism,
a statue of life size, was throned in the midst of an
amiable group of human Vices, with Madness by her
side, and Wisdom menacing them with lofty wrath.
Great are the perils of symbolism. Robespierre ap-
plied a torch to Atheism, but alas, the wind was
hostile, or else Atheism and Madness were damp.
They obstinately resisted the torch, and it was hapless
Wisdom who took fire. Her face, all blackened by
smoke, grinned a hideous ghastly grin at her sturdy

ROBESPIERRE. 103

rivals. The miscarriage of the allegory was an evil
omen, and men probably thought how much better
-the churchmen always managed their conjurings and
the art of spectacle. There was a great car drawn by
milk-white oxen ; in the front were ranged sheaves
of golden grain, while at the back shepherds and shep-
herdesses posed with scenic graces. The whole mum-
mery was pagan. It was a bringing back of Cerealia
and Thesmophoria to earth. It stands as the most
disgusting and contemptible anachronism in history.

The famous republican Calendar, with its Prairials
and Germinals, its Ventoses and Pluvioses, was an
anachronism of the same kind, though it was less
despicable in its manifestation. Its philosophic base
was just as retrograde and out of season as the fooleries
of the Feast of the Supreme Being. The association
of worship and sacredness with the fruits of the earth,
with the forces of nature, with the power and variety
of the elements, could only be sincere so long as men
really thought of all these things as animated each by
a special will of its own. Such an association became
mere charlatanry, when knowledge once passed into
the positive stage. How could men go back to adore
an outer world, after they had found out the secret
that it is a mere huge group of phenomena, following
fixed courses, and not obeying spontaneous and un-
accountable volitions of their own 1 And what could
be more puerile than the fanciful connection of the
Supreme Being with a pastoral simplicity of life ^
This simplicity was gone, irrecoverably gone, with

104 ROBESPIEHRE.

the passage from nomad times to the complexities of

a modern society. To typify, therefore, the Supreme

Being as specialty interested in shocks of grain and in

shepherds and shepherdesses was to make him a mere

figure in an idyll, the ornament of a rural mask, a god

of the garden, instead of the sovereign director of the

universal forces, and stern master of the destinies of

men. Chaumette's commemoration of the Divinity

of Reason was a sensible performance, compared with

Robespierre's farcical repartee. It was something, as

Comte has said, to select for worship man's most

individual attribute. If they could not contemplate

society as a whole, it was at least a gain to pay homage

to that faculty in the human rulers of the world, which

had brought the forces of nature — its plnviosity,

nivosity, germinality, and vendemiarity— under the

i yoke for the service of men.

/ .

/ If the philosophy of Robespierre's pageant was so

f retrograde and false, its politics were still more inane.

It is a monument of presumptuous infatuation that

any one should feel so strongly as he did that order

could only be restored on condition of coming to

terms with religious use and prejudice, and then that

he should dream that his Supreme Being — a mere

didactic phrase, the deity of a poet's georgic — should

adequately replace that eternal marvel of construction,

by means of which the great churchmen had wrought

dogma and liturgy and priest and holy office into

every hour and every mood of men's lives. There is

no binding principle of human association in a creed

ROBESPIERRE. 105

with this one bald article. 'In truth,' as I have said
elsewhere of such deism as Robespierre's, 'one can
scarcely call it a creed. It is mainly a name for a
particular mood of fine spiritual exaltation ; the ex-
pression of a state of indefinite aspiration and supreme
feeling for lofty things. Are you going to convert
the new barbarians of our western world with this
fair word of emptiness 1 Will you sweeten the lives
of suffering men, and take its heaviness from that
droning piteous chronicle of wrong and cruelty and
despair, which everlastingly saddens the compassionat-
ing ear like moaning of a midnight sea; will you
animate the stout of heart with new fire, and the
firm of hand with fresh joy of battle, by the thought
of a being without intelligible attributes, a mere
abstract creation of metaphysic, whose mercy is not
as our mercy, nor his justice as our justice, nor his
fatherhood as the fatherhood of men % It was not by
a cold, a cheerless, a radically depraving conception
such as this, that the church became the refuge of
humanity in the dark times of old, but by the
representation, to men sitting in bondage and con-
fusion, of godlike natures moving among them, under
figure of the most eternally touching of human
relations, — a tender mother ever interceding for them,
and an elder brother laying down his life that their
burdens might be loosened.'

On the day of the Feast of the Supreme Being, the
guillotine was concealed in the folds of rich hangings.

106 ROBESPIERRE.

)It was the Twentieth of Prairial. Two days later
Couthon proposed to the Convention the memorable
Law of the Twenty-second Prairial. Robespierre was
the draftsman, and the text of it still remains in his
own writing. This monstrous law is simply the
complete abrogation of all law. Of all laws ever
passed in the world it is the most nakedly iniquitous.
Tyrants have often substituted their own will for the
ordered procedure of a tribunal, but no tyrant before
ever went through the atrocious farce of deliberately
making a tribunal the organised negation of security
for justice. Couthon laid its theoretic base in a
fallacy that must always be full of seduction to shallow
persons in authority : ' He who would subordinate
the public safety to the inventions of jurisconsults, to
the formulas of the Court, is either an imbecile or a
scoundrel.' As if public safety could mean anything
but the safety of the public. The author of the Law
of Prairial had forgotten the minatory word of the
sage to whom he had gone on a pilgrimage in the
days of his youth. ' All becomes legitimate and even
virtuous,' Helve'tius had written, 'on behalf of the
public safety.' Rousseau inscribed on the margin,
'The public safety is nothing, unless individuals
enjoy security.' What security was possible under
the Law of Prairial 1

After the probity and good judgment of the
tribunal, the two cardinal guarantees in state trials
are accurate definition, and proof. The offence must
be capable of precise description, and the proof against

ROBESPIERRE. 107

an offender must conform to strict rule. The Law of
Prairial violently infringed all three of these essential
conditions of judicial equity. First, the number of
the jury who had power to convict was reduced.
Second, treason was made to consist in such vague
and infinitely elastic kinds of action as inspiring dis-
couragement, misleading opinion, depraving manners,
corrupting patriots, abusing the principles of the
Revolution by perfidious applications. Third, proof
was to lie in the conscience of the jury ; there was an
end of preliminary inquiry, of witnesses in defence,
and of counsel for the accused. Any kind of testimony
was evidence, whether material or moral, verbal or
written, if it was of a kind ' likely to gain the assent
of a man of reasonable mind.'

Now what was Robespierre's motive in devising
this infernal instrument 1 The theory that he loved
judicial murder for its own sake, can only be held by
the silliest of royalist or clerical partisans. It is like
the theory of the vulgar kind of Protestantism, that
Mary Tudor or Philip of Spain had a keen delight in
shedding blood. Robespierre, like Mary and like
Philip, would have been as well pleased if all the
world would have come round to his mind without
the destruction of a single life. The true inquisitor
is a creature of policy, not a man of blood by taste.
What, then, was the policy that inspired the Law of
Prairial 1 To us the answer seems clear. We know
what was the general aim in Robespierre's mind at
this point in the history of the Revolution. His

108 ROBESPIEKKK.

brother Augustin was then the representative of the
Convention with the army of Italy, and General
Bonaparte was on terms of close intimacy with him.
Bonaparte said long afterwards, when he was expiating
a life of iniquity on the rock of Saint Helena, that he
saw long letters from Maximilian to Augustin Robes-
pierre, all blaming the Conventional Commissioners
— Tallien, Fouche, Barras, Collot, and the rest — for
the horrors they perpetrated, and accusing them of
ruining the Revolution by their atrocities. Again,
there is abundant testimony that Robespierre did his
best to induce the Committee of Public Safety to bring
those odious malefactors to justice. The text of the
Law itself discloses the same object. The vague
phrases of depraving manners and applying revolu-
tionary principles perfidiously, were exactly calculated
to smite the band of violent men whose conduct was
to Robespierre the scandal of the Revolution. And
there was a curious clause in the law as originally
presented, which deprived the Convention of the
right of preventing measures against its own members.
Robespierre's general design in short was to effect a
further purgation of the Convention. There is no
reason to suppose that he deliberately aimed at any
more general extermination. On the other hand, it
is incredible that, as some have maintained, he should
merely have had in view the equalisation of rich and
poor before the tribunals, by withdrawing the aid of
counsel and testimony to civic character from both
rich and poor alike.

ROBESPIERRE. 109

' If Robespierre's design was what we believe it
to have been, the result was a ghastly failure. The
Committee of Public Safety would not consent to
apply his law against the men for whom he had
specially designed it. The frightful weapon which he
had forged was seized by the Committee of General
Security, and Paris was plunged into the fearful days
of the Great Terror. The number of persons put to
death by the Revolutionary Tribunal before the Law
of Prairial had been comparatively moderate. From
the creation of the tribunal in April 1793, down to
the execution of the Hebertists in March 1794, the
number of persons condemned to death was 505.
From the death of the Hebertists down to the death j
of Robespierre, the number of the condemned was !
2158. One half of the entire number of victims, I
namely, 1356, were guillotined after the Law of
Prairial. No deadlier instrument was ever invented \
by the cruelty of man. Innocent women no less than I
innocent men, poor no less than rich, those in whom
life was almost spent, no less than those in whom
its pulse was strongest, virtuous no less than vicious,
were sent off in woe-stricken batches all those summer
days. A man was informed against; he was seized
in his bed at five in the morning ; at seven he was
taken to the Conciergerie ; at nine he received informa-
tion of the charge against him ; at ten he went into
the dock ; by two in the afternoon he was condemned ;
by four his head lay in the executioner's basket.

What stamps the system of the Terror at this date I

110 ROBESPIEKRE.

with a wickedness that cannot be effaced, is that at
no moment was the danger from foreign or domestic
foe less serious. We may always forgive something to
well-grounded panic. The proscriptions of an earlier
date in Paris were not excessively sanguinary, if we
remember that the city abounded in royalists and
other reactionists, who were really dangerous in
fomenting discouragement and spreading confusion.
If there ever is an excuse for martial law, and it must
be rare, the French government were warranted in
resorting to it in 1793.' Paris in those days was like
a city beleaguered, and the world does not use very
harsh words about the commandant of a besieged
town who puts to death traitors found within his
walls. Opinion in England at this very epoch encour-
aged the Tory government to pass a Treason Bill,
which introduced as vague a definition of treasonable
offence as even the Law of Prairial itself. Windham
did not shrink from declaring in parliament that he
and his colleagues were determined to exact ' a rigour
beyond the law.' And they were as good as their
word. The Jacobins had no monopoly either of cruel
law or cruel breach of law in the eighteenth century.
Only thirty years before, opinion in Pennsylvania
had prompted a hideous massacre of harmless Indians
as a deed acceptable to God, and the grandson of
William Penn proclaimed a bounty of fifty dollars for
the scalp of a female Indian, and three times as much
for a male. A man would have had quite as good a
chance of justice from the Revolutionary Tribunal,

ROBESPIERRE. Ill

asat the hands of Braxfield, the Scotch judge, who
condemned Muir and Palmer for sedition in 1793,
and who told the government, with a brazen front
worthy of Carrier or Collot d'Herbois themselves,
that, if they would only send him prisoners, he would
find law for them.

We have no sympathy with the spirit of paradox
that has arisen in these days, amusing itself by the
vindication of bad men. We think that the author
of the Law of Prairial was a bad man. But it is
time that there should be an end of the cant which
lifts up its hands at the crimes of republicans and
freethinkers, and shuts its eyes to the crimes of kings
and churches. Once more, we ought to rise into a
higher air; we ought to condemn, wherever we find
it, whether on the side of our adversaries or on our
own, all readiness to substitute arbitrary force for
the processes of ordered justice. There are moments
when such a readiness may be leniently judged, but
Prairial of 1794 was not one of them either in France
or in England. And what makes the crime of this
law more odious, is its association with the official
proclamation of the State worship of a Supreme j
Being. The scene of Robespierre's holy festival be-
comes as abominable as a catholic Auto-da-fe, where
solemn homage was offered to the God of pity and
loving-kindness, while flame glowed round the limbs
of the victims. *

Robespierre was inflamed with resentment, not

112 ROBESPIERRE.

because so many people were guillotined every day,
but because the objects of his own enmity were not
among them. He was chagrined at the miscarriage
of his scheme ; hut the chagrin had its root in his
desire for order, and not in his humanity. A good
man — say so imperfectly good a man as Panton —
could not have endured life, after enacting ,uch a
law, and seeing the ghastly work that it was doing.
He could hardly have contented himself with draw-
ing tears from the company in Madame Duplay's little
parlour, by his pathetic recitations from Corneille and
Racine, or with listening to melting notes from the
violin of Le Bas. It is commonly said by Robes-
pierre's defenders that he withdrew from the Com-
mittee of Public Safety, as soon as he found out that
he was powerless to arrest the daily shedding of
blood. The older assumption used to be that he left
Paris, and ceased to be cognisant of the Committee's
deliberations. The minutes, however, prove that +\is
was not the case. Robespierre signed papers nenily
every day of Messidor — (June 19 to July 18) the
blood-stained month between Prairial and Thermidor
— and was thoroughly aware of the doings of the
Committee. His partisans have now fallen back on
the singular theory of what they style moral absence.
He was present in the flesh, but standing aloof in
the spirit. His frowning silence was a deadlier re-
buke to the slayers and oppressors than secession.
Unfortunately for this ingenious explanation of the
embarrassing f^ct of a merciful man standing silent

ROBESPIERRE. 113

before merciless doings, there are at least two facts
that show its absurdity.

First, there is the affair of Catherine Theot.
Catherine Theot was a crazy old woman of a type
that is commoner in protestant than in catholic
countries! She believed herself to have special gifts
in the interpretation of the holy writings, and a few
other people as crazy as herself chose to accept her
pretensions. One revelation vouchsafed to her was
to the effect that Eobespierre was a Messiah and the
new redeemer of the human race. The Committee
of General Security resolved to indict this absurd
sect. Vadier, — one of the roughest of the men whom
the insurrections of Paris had brought to the front —
reported on the charges to the Convention (27 Prairial,
June 15), and he took the opportunity to make
Robespierre look profoundly ridiculous. The unfor-
tunate Messiah sat on his bench, gnawing his lips
with bitter rage, while, amid the sneers and laughter
of the Convention, the officers brought to the bar the
foolish creatures who had called him the Son of God.
His thin pride and prudish self-respect were unutterably
affronted, and he quite understood that the ridicule
of the mysticism of Theot was an indirect pleasantry
upon his own Supreme Being. He flew to the
Committee of Public Safety, angrily reproached them
for permitting the prosecution, summoned Fouquier-
Tinville, and peremptorily ordered him to let the
matter drop. In vain did the public prosecutor point
out that there was a decree of the Convention ordering

vol. i. i

114 KOBESHEERE.

him to proceed. Robespierre was inexorable. The
Committee of General Security were baffled, and the
prosecution ended. ' Lutteur impuissant et fatigue,'
says M. Hamel, the most thoroughgoing defender of
Robespierre, upon this, 'il va se retirer, moralement
du moins.' Impotent and wearied ! But he had just
won a most signal victory for good sense and humanity.
Why was it the only one 1 If Robespierre was able
to save Th6ot, why could he not save Cecile Renault ?
Cecile Renault was a young seamstress who was
found one evening at the door of Robespierre's
lodging, calling out in a state of exaltation that she
would fain see what a tyrant looked like. She was
arrested, and upon her were found two little knives
used for the purposes of her trade. That she should
be arrested and imprisoned was natural enough. The
times were charged with deadly fire. People had not
forgotten that Marat had been murdered- in his own
house. Only a few days before Cecile Renault's visit
to Robespierre, an assassin had fired a pistol at Collot
d'Herbois on the staircase of his apartment. We may
make allowance for the excitement of the hour, and
Robespierre had as much right to play the martyr, as
had Lewis the Fifteenth after the incident of Damiens'
rusty pen-knife. But the histrionic exigencies of the
chief of a faction ought not to be pushed too far.
And it was a monstrous crime that because Robespierre
found it convenient to pose as sacrificial victim at the
Club, therefore he should have had no scruple in
seeing not only the wretched Cecile, but her father,

ROBESPIERRE. 115

her aunt, and one of her brothers, all despatched to
the guillotine in the red shirt of parricide, as agents
of Pitt and Coburg, and assassins of the father of the
land. This was exactly two days after he had shown
his decisive power in the affair of the religious
illuminists. The only possible conclusion open to a
plain man after weighing and putting aside all the
sophisms with which this affair has been obscured, is
that Robespierre interfered in the one case because
its further prosecution would have tended to make
him ridiculous, and he did not interfere in the other,
because the more exaggerated, the more melodramatic,
the more murderous it was made, the more inter-
esting an object would he seem in the eyes of his
adorers.

The second fact bearing on Robespierre's humanity
is this. He had encouraged the formation and stimu-
lated the activity of popular commissions, who should
provide victims for the Revolutionary Tribunal. On
the Second of Messidor (June 20) a list containing
one hundred and thirty-eight names was submitted I
for the ratification of the Committee. The Committee
endorsed the bloody document, and the last signature
of the endorsement is that of him, who had resigned
a post in his youth rather than be a party to putting
a man to death. As was observed at the time,
Robespierre in doing this, suppressed his pique against
his colleagues, in order to take part in a measure,
that was a sort of complement to his Law of Prairial.

From these two circumstances, then, even if there

116 ROBESPIERRE.

were no other, we are justified in inferring that
Robespierre was struck by no remorse at the thought
that it was his law which had unbound the hands of
the horrible genie of civil murder. His mind was

I wholly absorbed in the calculations of a frigid egoism.
His intelligence, as we have always to remember, was

I very dim. He only aimed at one thing at once, and
that was seldom anything very great or far-reaching.
He was a man of peering and obscured vision in face

, of practical affairs. In passing the Law of Prairial,
his designs — and they were meritorious and creditable
designs enough in themselves — had been directed
against the corrupt chiefs, such as Tallien and Fouch6,
and against the fierce and coarse spirits of the
Committee of General Security, such as Vadier and
Voulland. Robespierre was above all things a
precisian. He had a sentimental sympathy with the
common people in the abstract, but his spiritual pride,
his pedantry, his formalism, his personal fastidious-
ness, were all wounded to the very quick by the kind
of men whom the Revolution had thrown to the
surface. Gouverneur Morris, then the American
minister, describes most of the members of the two
Committees as the very dregs of humanity, with
whom it is a stain to have any dealings ; as degraded
men only worthy of the profoundest contempt.
Danton had said : ' Robespierre is the least of a
scoundrel of any of the band.' The Committee of
General Security represented the very elements by
which Robespierre was most revolted. They offended

ROBESPIERKE. 117

his respectability ; their evil manners seemed to
tarnish that good name which his vanity hoped to
make as revered all over Europe, as it already was
among his partisans in France. It was indispensable
therefore to cut them off from the revolutionary
government, just as Hubert and as Danton had been
cut off. His colleagues of Public Safety refused to
lend themselves to this. Henceforth, with character-
istically narrow tenacity, he looked round for new
combinations, but, so far as I can see, with no broader
design than to enable him to punish these particular
objects of his very just detestation.

The position of sections and interests which ended
in the Revolution of Thermidor, is one of the most
extraordinarily intricate and entangled in the history
of faction. It would take a volume to follow out all
the peripeteias of the drama. Here we can only
enumerate in a few sentences the parties to the
contest and the conditions of the game. The reader
will easily discern the difficulty in Robespierre's way
of making an effective combination. First, there
were the two Committees. Of these the one, the
General Security, was thoroughly hostile to Robes-
pierre ; its members, as we have said, were wild and
hardy spirits, with no political conception, and with a
great contempt for fine phrases and philosophical
principles. They knew Robespierre's hatred for
them, and they heartily returned it. They were the
steadfast centre of the changing schemes which ended
in his downfall. The Committee of Public Safety

118 KOBESPIERRE.

!was divided. Carnot hated Saint Just, and Collot
d'Herbois hated Robespierre, and Billaud had a sombre
distrust of Robespierre's counsels. Shortly speaking,
the object of the Billaudists was to retain their power,
and their power was always menaced from two quarters,
the Convention and Paris. If they let Robespierre
have his own way against his enemies, would they
not be at his mercy whenever he chose to devise a
popular insurrection against them1? Yet if they
withstood Robespierre, they could only do so through
the agency of the Convention, and to fall back upon
the Convention would be to give that body an express
invitation to resume the power that had, in the
pressure of the crisis a year before, been delegated to
the Committee, and periodically renewed afterwards.
The dilemma of Billaud seemed desperate, and events
afterwards proved that it was so.

If we turn to the Convention, we find the position
equally distracting. They, too, feared another insur-
rection and a second decimation. If the Right helped
Robespierre to destroy the Fouch6s and Vadiers, he
would be stronger than ever ; and what security had
they against a repetition of the violence of the
Thirty-first of May? If the Dantonists joined in
destroying Robespierre, they would be helping the
Right, and what security had they against a Girondin
reaction? On the other hand, the Centre might
fairly hope, just what Billaud feared, that if the
Committee came to the Convention to crush Robes-
pierre, that would end in a combination strong

ROBESPIERRE. 119

enough to enable the Convention to crush the
Committees.

Much depended on military success. The victories
of the generals were the great strength of the
Committee. For so long it would be difficult to turn
opinion against a triumphant administration. 'At
the first defeat,' Eobespierre had said to Barere, 'I
await you.' But the defeat did not come. The
plotting went on with incessant activity; on one
hand, Eobespierre, aided by Saint Just and Couthon,
strengthening himself at the Jacobin Club, and
through that among the sections ; on the other, the
Mountain and the Committee of General Security
trying to win over the Right, more contemptuously
christened the Marsh or the Belly, of the Convention.
The Committee of Public Safety was not yet fully
decided how to act.

At the end of the first week of Thermidor> I
Robespierre could endure the tension no longer. I
He had tried to fortify his nerves for the struggle
by riding, but with so little success that he was
lifted off his horse fainting. He endeavoured to
steady himself by diligent pistol-practice. But noth-
ing gave him initiative and the sinews of action.
Saint Just urged him to raise Paris. Some bold men
proposed to carry off the members of the Committee
bodily from their midnight deliberations. Robespierre
declined, and fell back on what he took to be his
greatest strength and most unfailing resource; he
prepared a speech. On the Eighth of Thermidor

120 ROBESPIERRE.

he delivered it to the Convention, amid intense
excitement both within its walls and without. All
Paris knew that they were now on the eve of one
more of the famous Days; the revolution of Thermidor
had begun.

The speech of the Eighth Thermidor has seemed
to men of all parties since a masterpiece of tactical
ineptitude. If Robespierre had been a statesman
instead of a phrasemonger, he had a clear course.
He ought to have taken the line of argument that
Dan ton would have taken. That is to say, he ought
to have identified himself fully with the interests and
security of the Convention ; to have accepted the
growing resolution to close the Terror; to have
boldly pressed the abolition of the Committee of
General Security, and the removal from the Commit-
tee of Public Safety of Bill and, Collot, Barere ; to
have proposed to send about fifty persons to Cayenne
for life ; and to have urged a policy of peace with
the foreign powers. This was the substantial wisdom
and real interest of the position. The task was
difficult, because his hearers had the best possible
reasons for knowing that the author of the Law of
Prairial was a Terrorist on principle. And in truth
we know that Robespierre had no definite intention
of erecting clemency into a rule. He had not mental
strength enough to throw off the profound apprehen-
sion, which the incessant alarms of the last five years
had engendered in him ; and the only device, that he
could imagine for maintaining the republic against

ROBESPIERRE. 121

traitors, was to stimulate the rigour of the Revolu-
tionary Tribunal. |
If, however, Robespierre lacked the grasp which
might have made him the representative of a broad
and stable policy, it was at least his interest to per-
suade the men of the Plain that he entertained no
designs against them. And this is what in his own
mind he intended. But to do it effectively, it was
clearly best to tell his hearers, in so many words,
whom he realty wished them to strike. That would
have relieved the majority, and banished the suspicion
which had been busily fomented by his enemies, that
he had in his pocket a long list of their names for
proscription. But Robespierre, having for the first
time in his life ventured on aggressive action without
the support of a definite party, faltered. He dared
not to designate his enemies face to face and by name.
Instead of that, he talked vaguely of conspirators
against the republic, and calumniators of himself.
There Avas not a single bold, definite, unmistakable
sentence in the speech from first to last. The men
of the Plain were insecure and doubtful ; they had
no certainty that among conspirators and calumniators
he did not include too many of themselves. People
are not so readily seized by grand phrases, when their
heads are at stake. The sitting was long, and marked
by changing currents and reverses. When they broke
up, all was left uncertain. Robespierre had suffered
a check. Billaud felt that he could no longer hesi-
tate in joining the combination against his colleague.

122 ROBESPIERRE.

Each party was aware that the next day must seal
the fate of one or other of them. There is a legend
that in the evening Robespierre walked in the Champs
Elysees with his betrothed, accompanied as usual by
his faithful dog, Brount. They admired the purple
of the sunset, and talked of the prospect of a glorious
to-morrow. But this is apocryphal. The evening was
passed in no lover's saunterings, but amid the storm
and uproar of the Club. He went to the Jacobins to
read over again his speech of the day. ' It is my
testament of death,' he said, amid the passionate
protestations of his devoted followers. He had been
talking for the last three years of his willingness to
drink the hemlock, and to offer his breast to the
poniards of tyrants. That was a fashion of the speech
of the time, and in earlier days it had been more than
a fashion of speech, for Brunswick would have given
them short shrift. But now, when he talked of his
last testament, Robespierre did not intend it to be so
if he could prevent it. When he went to rest that
night, he had a tolerably calm hope that he should
win the next day's battle in the Convention, when he
was aware that Saint Just would attack the Com-
mittees openly and directly. If he would have
allowed his band to invade the Pavilion de Flore, and
carry off or slay the Committees who sat up through
the night, the battle would have been won when
he awoke. His friends are justified in saying that
his strong respect for legality was the cause of his
iruin.

ROBESPIERRE. 123

Men in all ages have had a superstitious fondness
for connecting awful events in their lives with portents
and signs among the outer elements. It was noticed
that the heat during the terrible days of Thermidor
was more intense than had been known within the
memory of man. The thermometer never fell below
sixty-five degrees in the coolest part of the night, and
in the daytime men and women and beasts of burden
fell down dead in the streets. By five o'clock in the \
morning of the Ninth Thermidor, the galleries of the \
Convention were filled by a boisterous and excited
throng. At ten o'clock the proceedings began as
usual with the reading of correspondence from the
departments and from the armies. Robespierre, who
had been escorted from his lodgings by the usual body
of admirers, instead of taking his ordinary seat, re-
mained standing by the side of the tribune. It is a
familiar fact that moments of appalling suspense are
precisely those in which we are most ready involun-
tarily to note a trifle ; everybody observed that
Eobespierre wore the coat of violet-blue silk and the
white nankeens in which a few weeks previously he
had done honour to the Supreme Being.

The galleries seemed as enthusiastic as ever. The
men of the Plain and the Marsh had lost the abject
mien with which they usually cowered before Robes-
pierre's glance ; they wore a courageous air of judi-
cial reserve. The leaders of the Mountain wandered
restlessly to and fro among the corridors. At noon
Tallien saw that Saint Just had ascended the tribune.

124 ROBESPIERRE.

Instantly he rushed down into the chamber, knowing
that the battle had now begun in fierce earnest.
Saint Just had not got through two sentences, before
Tallien interrupted him. He began to insist with
energy that there should be an end to the equivocal
phrases with which Paris had been too long alarmed
by the Triumvirate. Billaud, fearing to be outdone
in the attack, hastily forced his way to the tribune,
broke into what Tallien was saying, and proceeded
dexterously to discredit Robespierre's allies without
at once assailing Robespierre himself. Le Bas ran in
a fury to stop him ; Collot d'Herbois, the president,
declared Le Bas out of order ; the hall rang with
cries of ' To prison ! To the Abbey ! ' and Le Bas
was driven from the tribune. This was the beginning
of the tempest. Robespierre's enemies knew that
they were fighting for their lives, and this inspired
them with a strong and resolute power that is always
impressive in popular assemblies. He still thought
himself secure. Billaud pursued his accusations.
Robespierre, at last, unable to control himself, scaled
the tribune. There suddenly burst forth from Tallien
and his partisans vehement shouts of ' Down with the
tyrant ! down with the tyrant ! ' The galleries were
swept by a wild frenzy of vague agitation ; the
president's bell poured loud incessant clanging into
the tumult ; the men of the Plain held themselves
firm and silent ; in the tribune raged ferocious groups,
Tallien menacing Robespierre with a dagger, Billaud
roaring out proposals to arrest this person and that

ROBESPIERRE. 125

Robespierre gesticulating, threatening, yelling, shriek-
ing. His enemies knew that if he were once allowed
to get a hearing, his authority might even yet over-
awe the waverers. A penetrative word or a heroic
gesture might lose them the day. The majority of
the chamber still hesitated. They called for Barere,
in whose adroit faculty for discovering the winning
side they had the confidence of long experience.
Robespierre, recovering some of his calm, and per-
ceiving now that he had really to deal with a serious
revolt, again asked to be heard before Barere. But
the cries for Barere were louder than ever. Barere
spoke, in a sense hostile to Robespierre, but warily
and without naming him.

• Then there was a momentary lull. The Plain was
uncertain. The battle might even now turn either
way. Robespierre made another attempt to speak,
but Tallien with intrepid fury broke out into a torrent
of louder and more vehement invective. Robespierre's
shrill voice was heard in disjected snatches, amidst
the violent tones of Tallien, the yells of the president
calling Robespierre to order, the murderous clanging
of the bell. Then came that supreme hour of the
struggle, whose tale has been so often told, when
Robespierre turned from his old allies of the Mountain,
and succeeded in shrieking out an appeal to the probity
and virtue of the Right and the Plain. To his horror,
even these despised men, after a slight movement,
remained mute. Then his cheeks blanched, and the
sweat ran down his face. But anger and scornful im

1 26 ROBESPIERKE.

i patience swiftly came back and restored him. President
of assassins, he cried out to Thuriot, for the last time 1
ask to be heard. Thou canst not speak, called one, the
blood of Danton choices thee. He flung himself down
the steps of the tribune, and rushed towards the
benches of the Eight. Come no further, cried another,
Vergniaud and Condorcet sat here. He regained the
^ribune, but his speech was gone. He was reduced
o the dregs of an impotent and gasping voiceless
gesticulation, like the strife of one in a nightmare.

The day was lost. The tension of a passionate
and violent struggle prolonged for many hours always
at length exasperates onlookers with something of the
brute ferocity of the actors. The physical strain stirs
the tiger in the blood ; they conceive a cruel hatred
against weakness, just as the heated throng of a Roman
amphitheatre turned up their thumbs for, the instant
despatch of the unfortunate swordsman who had been
too ready to lower his arms. The Right, the Plain,
even the galleries, despised the man who had suc-
cumbed. If Robespierre had possessed the physical
strength of Mirabeau or Danton, the Ninth Thermidor
would have been another of his victories. He was
crushed by the relentless ferocity and endurance of
his antagonists. A decree for his arrest was resolved
upon by acclamation. He cast a glance at the galleries,
as marvelling that they should remain passive in face
of an outrage on his person. They were mute. The
ushers advanced with hesitation to do their duty, and
not without trembling carried him away, along with

KOBESPIEERE. 1 27

Couthon and Saint Just. The brother, for whom he
had made honourable sacrifices in days that seemed
to be divided from the present by an abyss of cen-
turies, insisted with fine heroism on sharing his fate,
and Augustin Robespierre and Le Bas were led off to
the prisons along with their leader and idol.

It was now a little after four o'clock. The Con-
vention, with the self-possession that so often amazes
us in its proceedings, went on with formal business
for another hour. At five they broke up. For life,
as the poets tell, is a daily stage-play ; men declaim
their high heroic parts, then doff the buskin or the
sock, wash away the paint from their cheeks, and
gravely sit down to meat. The Conventionals, as
they ate their dinners, were unconscious, apparently,
that the great crisis of the drama was still to come.
The next twelve hours were to witness the climax.
Robespierre had been crushed by the Convention ; it
remained to be seen whether the Convention would
not now be crushed by the Commune of Paris.

Robespierre was first conducted to the prisons of
the Luxembourg. The gaoler, on some plea of infor-
mality, refused to receive him. The terrible prisoner
was next taken to the Maine, where he remained
among joyful friends from eight in the evening until
eleven. Meanwhile the old insurrectionary methods
of the nights of June and of August in '92, of May
and of June in '93, Avere again followed. The beating
of the rappel and the gdndrale was heard in all the
sections ; the tocsin sounded its dreadful note, remind-

128 ROBESPIERRE.

ling all who should hear it that insurrection is the
most sacred and the most iudispensable of duties.
Hauriot, the commandant of the forces, had been
arrested in the evening, but he was speedily released
by the agents of the Commune. The Council issued
manifestoes and decrees from the Common Hall every
moment. The barriers were closed. Cannon were
posted opposite the doors of the hall of the Convention.
The quays were thronged. Emissaries sped to and
fro between the Jacobin Club and the Common Hall,
and between these two centres and each of the forty-
eight sectious. It is one of the inscrutable mysteries
of this delirious night, that Hanriot did not at once
use the force at his command to break up the Con-
vention. There is no obvious reason why he should
not have done so. The members of the Convention
had re-assembled after their dinner, towards seven
o'clock. The hall which had resounded with the
shrieks and yells of the furious gladiators of the
factions all day, now lent a lugubrious echo to gloomy
reports which one member after another delivered
from the shadow of the tribune. Towards nine o'clock
the members of the two dread Committees came in
panic to seek shelter among their colleagues, 'as
dejected in their peril,' says an eyewitness, ' as they
had been cruel and insolent in the hour of their
supremacy.' When they heard that Hanriot had been
released, and that guns were at their door, all gave
themselves up for lost and made ready for death.
News came that Robespierre had broken his arrest.

ROBESPIERRE. 129

and gone to the Common Hall. Eobespierre, after
urgent and repeated solicitations, had been at length
persuaded about an hour before midnight to leave
the Mairie and join his partisans of the Commune.
This was an act of revolt against the Convention, for
the Mairie was a legal place of detention, and so long
as he was there, he was within the law. The Con- j
vention with heroic intrepidity declared both Hanriot
and Robespierre beyond the pale of the law. This
prompt measure was its salvation. Twelve members
were instantly named to carry the decree to all the
sections. With the scarf of office round their waists,
and a sabre in hand, they sallied forth. Mounting '
horses, and escorted by attendants with flaring torches,
they scoured Paris, calling all good citizens to the
succour of the Convention, haranguing crowds at the
street corners with power and authority, and striking
the imaginations of men. At midnight heavy rain
began to fall.

The leaders of the Commune meanwhile, in full
confidence that victory was sure, contented themselves
with incessant issue of paper decrees, to each of which
the Convention replied by a counter-decree. Those
who have studied the situation most minutely, are of
opinion that even so late as one o'clock in the morning,
the Commune might have made a successful defence,
although it had lost the opportunity, which it had
certainly possessed up to ten o'clock, of destroying
ing the Convention. But on this occasion the genius
of insurrection slumbered. And there was a genuine

VOL. I. K

1 30 EOBESPIERKE.

division of opinion in the eastern quarters of Paris,
the result of a grim distrust of the man who had
helped to slay Hebert and Chaumette. At a word
this distrust began to declare itself. The opinion of
the sections became more and more distracted. One
! armed group cried, Down with the Convention/ An-
/ other armed group cried, The Convention for ever, and
down with the Commune/ The two great faubourgs
were all astir, and three battalions were ready to
march. Emissaries from the Convention actually
succeeded in persuading them — such the dementia of
the night — that Robespierre was a royalist agent, and
that the Commune were about to deliver the little
Lewis from his prison in the Temple. One body of
communist partisans after another was detached from
its allegiance. The deluge of rain emptied the Place
de Greve, and when companies came up from the
sections in obedience to orders from Hanriot and the
Commune, the silence made them suspect a trap, and
they withdrew towards the great metropolitan church
or elsewhere.

Barras, whom the Convention had charged with
its military defence, gathered together some six thou-
; sand men. With the right instinct of a man who
had studied the history of Paris since the July of
1789, he foresaw the advantage of being the first to
make the attack. He arranged his forces into two
divisions. One of them marched along the quays to
take the Common Hall in front ; the other along the
Rue Saint Honore to take it in flank. Inside the

ROBESPIERRE. 131

Common Hall the staircases and corridors were alive !
with bustling messengers, and those mysterious busy-
bodies who are always found lingering without a
purpose on the skirts of great historic scenes. Robes-
pierre and the other chiefs were in a small room,
preparing manifestoes and signing decrees. They
were curiously unaware of the movements of the
Convention. An aggressive attack by the party of
authority upon the party of insurrection was unknown
in the tradition of revolt. They had an easy assur-
ance that at daybreak their forces would be prepared
once more to tramp along the familiar road westwards.
It was now half-past two. Eobespierre had just
signed the first two letters of his name to a document
before him, when he was startled by cries and uproar
in the Place below. In a few instants he lay stretched
on the ground, his jaw shattered by a pistol-shot.
His brother had either fallen or had leaped out of the
window. Couthon was hurled over a staircase, and
lay for dead. Saint Just was a prisoner.

Whether Eobespierre was shot by an officer of the
Conventional force, or attempted to blow out his own
brains, we shall never know, any more than we shall
ever be quite assured how Eousseau, his spiritual
master, came to an end. The wounded man was
carried, a ghastly sight, first to the Committee of
Public Safety, and then to the Conciergerie, where
he lay in silent stupefaction through the heat of the
summer day. As he was an outlaw, the only legal
preliminary before execution was to identify him.

132 ROBESPIERRE.

At five in the afternoon, he was raised into the cart.
Couthon and the younger Robespierre lay, confused
wrecks of men, at the bottom of it. Hanriot and
Saint Just, bruised, begrimed, and foul, completed
the band. One who walks from the Palace of Justice,
over the bridge, along the Rue Saint Honored into
the Rue Royale, and so to the Luxor column, retraces
the via dolorosa of the Revolution on the afternoon of
the Tenth of Thermidor.

The end of the intricate manoeuvres known as the
Revolution of Thermidor was the recovery of authority
by the Convention. The insurrections, known as the
days of the Twelfth Germinal, First Prairial, and
Thirteenth Vendemiaire, all ended in the victory of
the Convention over the revolutionary forces of Paris.
The Committees, on the other hand, had beaten
Robespierre, but they had ruined themselves. Very
gradually the movement towards order, which had
begun in the mind of Danton, and had gone on in the
cloudy purposes of Robespierre, became definite.
But it was in the interest of very different ideas from
those of either Danton or of Robespierre. A White
Terror succeeded the Red Terror. Not at once, how-
ever ; it was not until nine months after the death of
Robespierre, that the reaction was strong enough to
smite his colleagues of the two Committees. The
surviving Girondins had come back to their seats in
the Convention : the Dantonians had not forgiven
the execution of their chief. These two parties were

ROBESPIERRE. 133

bent on vengeance. In April, 1795, a decree was
passed banishing Billaud de Varennes, Collot d'Her-
bois, and Barere. In the following month the leaders
of the Committee of General Security were thrown
into prison. The revolution had passed into new
currents. We cannot see any reasons for thinking
that those currents would have led to any happier
results if Robespierre had won the battle. Tallien,
Fouche, Barras, and the rest may have been thoroughly
bad men. But then what qualities had Robespierre
for building up a state 1 He had neither strength of
practical character, nor firm breadth of political judg-
ment, nor a sound social doctrine. When we compare
him, — I do not say with Frederick of Prussia, with
Jefferson, with Washington, — but with the group of
able men who made the closing year of the Convention
honourable and of good service to France, we have
a measure of Robespierre's profound and pitiable
incompetence.

CARLYLE.

The new library edition of Mr. Carlyle's works may
be taken for the final presentation of all that the
author has to say to his contemporaries, and to
possess the settled form in which he wishes his
words to go to those of posterity who may prove to
have ears for them. The canon is definitely made
up. The golden Gospel of Silence is effectively
compressed in thirty fine volumes. After all has
been said about self-indulgent mannerisms, moral
perversities, phraseological outrages, and the rest,
these volumes will remain the noble monument of
the industry, originality, conscientiousness, and genius
of a noble character, and of an intellectual career
that has exercised on many sides the profoundest
sort of influence upon English feeling. Men who
have long since moved far away from these spiritual
latitudes, like those who still find an adequate shelter
in them, can hardly help feeling as they turn the
pages of the now disused pieces which they were
once wont to ponder daily, that whatever later
teachers may have done in definitely shaping opinion,
in giving specific form to sentiment, and in subjecting

136 CARLYLE.

impulse to rational discipline, here was the friendly
fire-bearer who first conveyed the Promethean spark,
here the prophet who first smote the rock.

That with this sense of obligation to the master,
there mixes a less satisfactory reminiscence of youth-
ful excess in imitative phrases, in unseasonably
apostolic readiness towards exhortation and rebuke,
in interest about the soul, a portion of which might
more profitably have been converted into care for
the head, is in most cases true. A hostile observer
of bands of Carlylites at Oxford and elsewhere might
have been justified in describing the imperative duty
of work as the theme of many an hour of strenuous
idleness, and the superiority of golden silence over
silver speech as the text of endless bursts of jerky
rapture, while a too constant invective against cant
had its usual effect of developing cant with a difference.
To the incorrigibly sentimental all this was sheer
poison, which continues tenaciously in the system.
Others of robuster character no sooner came into
contact with the world and its fortifying exigencies,
than they at once began to assimilate the wholesome
part of what they had taken in, while the rest falls
gradually and silently out. When criticism has clone
its just work on the disagreeable affectations of many
of Mr. Carlyle's disciples, and on the nature of Mr.
Carlyle's opinions and their worth as specific con-
tributions, very few people will be found to deny
that his influence in stimulating moral energy, in
kindling enthusiasm for virtues worthy of enthusiasm,

CARLYLE. 137

and in stirring a sense of the reality on the one hand, ^
and the unreality on the other, of all that man can
do or suffer, has not heen surpassed by any teacher
now living.

One of Mr. Carlyle's chief and just glories is, that
for more than forty years he has clearly seen, and
kept constantly and conspicuously in his own sight
and that of his readers, the profoundly important
crisis in the midst of which we are living. The
moral and social dissolution in progress about us, and
the enormous peril of sailing blindfold and haphazard,
without rudder or compass or chart, have always
been fully visible to him, and it is no fault of his if
they have not become equally plain to his contem-
poraries. The policy of drifting has had no
countenance from him. That a society should be
likely to last with hollow and scanty faith, with no
government, with a number of institutions hardly
one of them real, with a horrible mass of poverty-
stricken and hopeless subjects ; that, if it should last,
it could be regarded as other than an abomination of
desolation, he has boldly and often declared to be
things incredible. "We are not promoting the objects
which the social union subsists to fulfil, nor applyingA
with energetic spirit to the task of preparing a
sounder state for our successors. The relations
between master and servant, between capitalist and
labourer, between landlord and tenant, between
governing race and subject race, between the feelings
and intelligence of the legislature and the feelings

138 CAKLYLE.

and intelligence of the nation, between the spiritual
power, literary and ecclesiastical, and those who are
under it — the anarchy that prevails in all these, and
the extreme danger of it, have been with Mr. Carlyle
a never-ending theme. What seems to many of us
the extreme inefficiency or worse of his solutions,
still allows us to feel grateful for the vigour and
perspicacity with which he has pressed on the world
the urgency of the problem.

The degree of durability which his influence is
likely to possess with the next and following
generations is another and rather sterile question,
which we are not now concerned to discuss. The
unrestrained eccentricities which Mr. Carlyle's strong
individuality has precipitated in his written style may,
in spite of the poetic fineness of his imagination,
which no historian or humorist has excelled, still be
expected to deprive his work of that 'permanence
which is only secured by classic form. The incor-
poration of so many phrases, allusions, nicknames,
that belong only to the hour, inevitably makes the
vitality of the composition conditional on the vitality
of these transient and accidental elements which are
so deeply imbedded in it. Another consideration is
that no philosophic writer, however ardently his
words may have been treasured and followed by the
people of his own time, can well be cherished by
succeeding generations, unless his name is associated
through some definable and positive contribution
with the central march of European thought and

CARLYLE. 139

feeling. In other words, there is a difference between
/living in the history of literature or belief, and
living in literature itself and in the minds of believers.
Mr. Carlyle has been a most powerful solvent, but it
is the tendency of solvents to become merely historic.
The historian of the intellectual and moral movements
of Great Britain during the present century, will fail
egregiously in his task if he omits to give a large and
conspicuous space to the author of Sartor Besartus.
But it is one thing to study historically the ideas
which have influenced our predecessors, and anotheiv
thing to seek in them an influence fruitful for ourselves.
It is to be hoped that one may doubt the permanent
soundness of Mr. Carlyle's peculiar speculations,
without either doubting or failing to share that warm
affection and reverence which his personality has
' worthily inspired in many thousands of his readers.
He has himself taught us to separate these two sides
of a man, and we have learnt from him to love
Samuel Johnson without reading much or a word
that the old sage wrote. 'Sterling and I walked
westward,' he says once, ' arguing copiously, but except
in opinion not disagreeing.'

It is none the less for what has just been said a
weightier and a rarer privilege for a man to give a
stirring impulse to the moral activity of a generation, ^
than to write in classic style ; and to have impressed
the spirit of his own personality deeply upon the
minds of multitudes of men, than to have composed
most of those works which the world is said not

140 CAELYLE.

willingly to let die. Nor, again, is to say that this
higher renown belongs to Mr. Carlyle, to underrate
the less resounding, but most substantial, services
of a definite kind which he has rendered both to
literature and history. This work may be in time
superseded with the advance of knowledge, but the
value of the first service will remain unimpaired. It
was he, as has been said, ' who first taught England
to appreciate Goethe;' and not only to appreciate
Goethe, but to recognise and seek yet further
knowledge of the genius and industry of Goethe's
countrymen. His splendid drama of the French
Revolution has done, and may be expected long to
continue to do, more to bring before our slow-moving
and unimaginative public the portentous meaning of
that tremendous catactysm, than all the other writings
on the subject in the English language put together.
His presentation of Puritanism and the Common-
wealth and Oliver Cromwell first made the most
elevating period of the national history in any way
really intelligible. The Life of Frederick the Second,
whatever judgment we may pass upon its morality,
or even upon its place as a work of historic art, is a
model of laborious and exhaustive narration of facts
not before accessible to the reader of history. For
all this, and for much other work eminently useful
and meritorious even from the mechanical point of
view, Mr. Carlyle deserves the warmest recognition.
His genius gave him a right to mock at the in-
effectiveness of Dryasdust, but his genius was also

GAELYLB. 141

too true to prevent him from adding the always
needful supplement of a painstaking industry that
rivals Dryasdust's own most strenuous toil. Take out
of the mind of the English reader of ordinary cultiva-
tion and the average journalist, usually a degree or
two lower than this, their conceptions of the French
Revolution and the English Rebellion, and their know-
ledge of German literature and history, as well as
most of their acquaintance with the prominent men of
the eighteenth century, and we shall see how much
work Mr. Carlyle has done simply as schoolmaster.

This, however, is emphatically a secondary aspect
of his character, and of the function which he has
fulfilled in relation to the more active tendencies of
modern opinion and feeling. We must go on to
other ground, if we would find the field in which he
has laboured most ardently and with most accep-
tance. History and literature have been with him,
what they will always be with wise and understanding
minds of creative and even of the higher critical faculty
— only embodiments, illustrations, experiments, for
ideas about religion, conduct, society, history, govern-
ment, and all the other great heads and departments
of a complete social doctrine. From this point of
view, the time has perhaps come when we may fairly
attempt to discern some of the tendencies which Mr.
Carlyle has initiated or accelerated and deepened,
though assuredly many years must elapse before any
adequate measure can be taken of their force and
final direction.

142 CARLYLE.

It -would be a comparatively simple process to
affix the regulation labels of philosophy ; to say that
Mr. Carlyle is a Pantheist in religion (or a Pot-theist,
to use the alternative whose flippancy gave such
offence to Sterling on one occasion1), a Transcenden-
talist or Intuitionist in ethics, an Absolutist in
politics, and so forth, with the addition of a crowd of
privative or negative epithets at discretion. But
classifications of this sort are the worst enemies of
true knowledge. Such names are by the vast
majority even of persons who think themselves
educated, imperfectly apprehended, ignorantly inter-
preted, and crudely and recklessly applied. It is
not too much to say that nine out of ten people who
think they have delivered themselves of a criticism
when they call Mr. Carlyle a Pantheist, could neither
explain with any precision what Pantheism is, nor
have ever thought of determining the parts of his
writings where this particular monster is believed to
lurk. Labels are devices for saving talkative persons
the trouble of thinking. As I once wrote elsewhere :

" The readiness to use general names in speaking
of the greater subjects, and the fitness which qualifies
a man to use them, commonly exist in inverse
proportions. If we reflect on the conditions out of
which ordinary opinion is generated, we may well be
startled at the profuse liberality with which names
of the widest and most complex and variable signifi-
cance are bestowed on all hands. The majority of
1 Life, of John Sterling, p. 153.

CAKLYLE. 143

the ideas which constitute most men's intellectual
stock-in-tracle have accrued by processes quite distinct
from fair reasoning and consequent conviction. This
is so notorious, that it is amazing how so many
people can go on freely and rapidly labelling thinkers
or writers with names which they themselves are not
competent to bestow, and which their hearers are not
competent either to understand generally, or to test
in the specific instance.'

These labels are rather more worthless than
usual in the present case, because Mr. Carlyle is
ostentatiously illogical and defiantly inconsistent;
and, therefore, the term which might correctly
describe one side of his teaching or belief would be
tolerably sure to give a wholly false impression of
some of its other sides. The qualifications necessary
to make any one of the regular epithets fairly
applicable would have to be so many, that the glosses
would virtually overlay the text. "We shall be more
likely to reach an instructive appreciation by discard-
ing such substitutes for examination, and considering,
not what pantheistic, absolutist, transcendental, 02'
any other doctrine means, or what it is worth, but
what it is that Mr. Carlyle means about men, their
character, their relations to one another, and what
that is worth.

With most men and women the master element in
their opinions is obviously neither their own reason
nor their own imagination, independently exercised,
but only mere use and wont, chequered by fortuitous

144 CARLYLE.

sensations, and modified in the better cases by the
influence of a favourite teacher ; while in the worse
the teacher is the favourite who happens to chime
in most harmoniously with prepossessions, or most
effectually to nurse and exaggerate them. Among
the superior minds the balance between reason and
imagination is scarcely ever held exactly true, nor is
either firmly kept within the precise bounds that are
proper to it. It is a question of temperament which
of the two mental attitudes becomes fixed and habitual,
as it is a question of temperament how violently either
of them straitens and distorts the normal faculties of
vision. The man who prides himself on a hard head,
which would usually be better described as a thin
head, may and constantly does fall into a confirmed
manner of judging character and circumstance, so
narrow, one-sided, and elaborately superficial, as to
make common sense shudder at the crimes that are
committed in the divine name of reason. Excess on
the other side leads people into emotional transports,
in which the pre-eminent respect that is due to truth,
the difficulty of discovering the truth, the narrowness
of the way that leads thereto, the merits of intellec-
tual precision and definiteness, and even the merits
of moral precision and definiteness, are all effectually
veiled by purple or fiery clouds of anger, sympathy,
and sentimentalism, which imagination has hung over
the intelligence.

The familiar distinction between the poetic and the
scientific temper is another way of stating the same

CARLYLE. 145

difference. The one fuses or crystallises external
objects and circumstances in the medium of human
feeling and passion ; the other is concerned with the
relations of objects and circumstances among them-
selves, including in them all the facts of human con-
sciousness, and with the discovery and classification
of these relations. There is, too, a corresponding
distinction between the aspects which conduct, char-
acter, social movement, and the objects of nature are
able to present, according as we scrutinise them with
a view to exactitude of knowledge, or are stirred by
some appeal which they make to our various faculties
and forms of sensibility, our tenderness, sympathy,
awe, terror, love of beauty, and all the other emotions
in this momentous catalogue. The starry heavens
have one side for the astronomer, as astronomer, and
another for the poet, as poet. The nightingale, the
skylark, the cuckoo, move one sort of interest in an
ornithologist, and a very different sort in a Shelley
or a Wordsworth. The hoary and stupendous forma-
tions of the inorganic world, the thousand tribes of
insects, the great universe of plants, from those whose
size and form and hue make us afraid as if they were
deadly monsters, down to 'the meanest flower that
blows,' all these are clothed with one set of attributes
by scientific intelligence, and with another by senti-
ment, fancy, and imaginative association.

The contentiousness of rival schools of philosophy
has obscured the application of the same distinction
to the various orders of fact more nearly and immedi

VOL. i. L

146 CARLYLE.

ately relating to man and the social union. One school
has maintained the virtually unmeaning doctrine that
the will is free, and therefore its followers never gave
any quarter to the idea that man was as proper an
object of scientific scrutiny morally and historically,
as they could not deny him to be anatomically and
physiologically. Their enemies have been more con-
cerned to dislodge them from this position, than to
fortify, organise, and cultivate their own. The conse-
quences have not been without their danger. Poetic
persons have rushed in where scientific persons ought
not to have feared to tread. That human character
and the order of events have their poetic aspect, and
that their poetic treatment demands the rarest and
most valuable qualities of mind, is a truth which none
but narrow and superficial men of the world are rash
enough to deny. But that there is a scientific aspect
of these things, an order among them that can only
be understood and criticised and effectually modified
scientifically, by using all the caution and precision
and infinite patience of the truly scientific spirit, is
a truth that is constantly ignored even by men and
women of the loftiest and most humane nature. In
such cases misdirected and uncontrolled sensibility
ends in mournful waste of their own energy, in the
certain disappointment of their own aims, and where
such sensibility is backed by genius, eloquence, and
a peculiar set of public conditions, in prolonged and
fatal disturbance of society.

Rousseau was the great type of this triumphant and

CAKLYLE. 147

dangerous sophistry of the emotions. The Rousseau
of these times for English-speaking nations is Thomas
Carlyle. An apology is perhaps needed for mention-
ing a man of such simple, veracious, disinterested, and
wholly high-minded life, in the same breath with one
of the least sane men that ever lived. Community
of method, like misery, makes men acquainted with
strange bed -fellows. Two men of very different
degrees of moral worth may notoriously both preach
the same faith and both pursue the same method, and
the method of Rousseau is the method of Mr. Carlyle.
With each of them thought is an aspiration, and
justice a sentiment, and society a retrogression. Each
bids us look within our own bosoms for truth and
right, postpones reason to feeling, and refers to intro-
spection and a factitious something styled Nature,
questions only to be truly solved by external observa-
tion and history. In connection with each of them
has been exemplified the cruelty inherent in senti-
mentalism, when circumstances draw away the mask.
Not the least conspicuous of the disciples of Rous-
seau was Robespierre. His works lay on the table of
the Committee of Public Safety. The theory of the
Reign of Terror was invented, and mercilessly reduced
to practice, by men whom the visions of Rousseau
had fired, and who were not afraid nor ashamed to
wade through oceans of blood to the promised land
of humanity and fine feeling. We in our days have
seen the same result of sentimental doctrine in the
barbarous love of the battle-field, the retrograde

1 48 CAKLYLE.

passion for methods of repression, the contempt for
human life, the impatience of orderly and peaceful
solution. We begin with introspection and the eterni-
ties, and end in blood and iron. Again, Eousseau's
first piece was an anathema upon the science and art
of his time, and a denunciation of books and speech.
Mr. Carlyle, in exactly the same spirit, has denounced
logic mills, warned us all away from literature, and
habitually subordinated discipline of the intelligence
to the passionate assertion of the will. There are
passages in which he speaks respectfully of Intellect,
but he is always careful to show that he is using the
term in a special sense of his own, and confounding
it with 'the exact summary of human Worth,' as in
one place he defines it. Thus, instead of co-ordinat-
ing moral worthiness with intellectual energy, virtue
with intelligence, right action of the will with scientific
processes of the understanding, he has either placed
one immeasurably below the other, or else has mis-
chievously insisted on treating them as identical.
The dictates of a kind heart are of superior force to
the maxims of political economy ; swift and peremp-
tory resolution is a safer guide than a balancing
judgment. If the will works easily and surely, we
may assume the rectitude of the moving impulse.
All this is no caricature of a system which sets senti-
ment, sometimes hard sentiment and sometimes soft
sentiment, above reason and method.

In other words, the writer who in these days has
done more than anybody else to fire men's hearts

CARLYLE. 149

with a feeling for right and an eager desire for social
activity, has with deliberate contempt thrust away
from him the only instruments by which we can
make sure what right is, and that our social action
is wise and effective. A born poet, only wanting
perhaps a clearer feeling for form and a more delicate
spiritual self-possession, to have added another name
to the illustrious catalogue of English singers, he has
been driven by the impetuosity of his sympathies to
attack the scientific side of social questions in an
imaginative and highly emotional manner. Depth
of benevolent feeling is unhappily no proof of fitness
for handling complex problems, and a fine sense of
the picturesque is no more a qualification for dealing
effectively with the difficulties of an old society, than
the composition of Wordsworth's famous sonnet on
Westminster Bridge was any reason for supposing
that the author would have made a competent Com-
missioner of Works.

Why should society, with its long and deep-hidden
processes of growth, its innumerable intricacies and
far-off historic complexities, be as an open book to
any reader of its pages who brings acuteness and
passion, but no patience nor calm accuracy of medi-
tation1? Objects of thought and observation far
simpler, more free from all blinding and distorting
elements, more accessible to direct and ocular
inspection, are by rational consent reserved for the
calmest and most austere moods and methods of
human intelligence. Nor is denunciation of the

150 GARLYLE.,

conditions of a problem the quickest step towards
solving it. Vituperation of the fact that supply and
demand practically regulate certain kinds of bargain,
is no contribution to systematic efforts to discover
some more moral regulator. Take all the invective
that Mr. Carlyle has poured out against political
economy, the Dismal Science, and Gospel according
to M'Croudy. Granting the absolute and entire
inadequateness of political economy to sum up the
laws and conditions of a healthy social state — and
no one more than the present writer deplores the
mischief which the application of the maxims of
political economy by ignorant and selfish spirits has
effected in confirming the worst tendencies of the
commercial character — yet is it not a first condition
of our being able to substitute better machinery for
the ordinary rules of self-interest, that we know
scientifically how those rules do and must operate?
Again, in another field, it is well to cry out : ' Caitiff,
we hate thee,' with a ' hatred, a hostility inexorable,
unappeasable, which blasts the scoundrel, and all
scoundrels ultimately, into black annihilation and
disappearance from the scene of things.'1 But this
is slightly vague. It is not scientific. There are
caitiffs and caitiffs. There is a more and a less of
scoundrelism, as there is a more and a less of black
annihilation, and we must have systematic juris-
prudence, with its classification of caitiffs and its
graduated blasting. Has Mr. Carlyle's passion, or
1 Latter-Day Pamphlets. II. Model Prisons, p. 92.

CARLYLE. 151

have the sedulous and scientific labours of that
Bentham, whose name with him is a symbol of evil,
done most in what he calls the Scoundrel-province
of Eeform within the last half-century1? Sterling's
criticism on Teufelsdrockh told a hard but wholesome
truth to Teufelsdrockh 's creator. 'Wanting peace
himself,' said Sterling, ' his fierce dissatisfaction fixes
on all that is weak, corrupt, and imperfect around
him; and instead of a calm and steady co-operation
with all those who are endeavouring to apply the
highest ideas as remedies for the worst evils, he
holds himself in savage isolation.'1

Mr. Carlyle assures us of Bonaparte that he had
an instinct of nature better than his culture was, and
illustrates it by the story that during the Egyptian
expedition, when his scientific men were busy arguing
that there could be no God, Bonaparte, looking up to
the stars, confuted them decisively by saying : ' Very
ingenious, Messieurs ; but who made all that?' Surely
the most inconclusive answer since coxcombs van-
quished Berkeley with a grin. It is, however, a type
of Mr. Carlyle's faith in the instinct of nature, as
superseding the necessity for patient logical method ;
a faith, in other words, in crude and uninterpreted
sense. Insight, indeed, goes far, but it no more
entitles its possessor to dispense with reasoned
discipline and system in treating scientific subjects,
than it relieves him from the necessity of conforming
to the physical conditions of health. Why should
1 Letter to Mr. Carlyle, in the Life, Pt. it. ch. ii.

152 CAKLYLE.

society be the one field of thought in which a man of
genius is at liberty to assume all his major premisses,
and swear all his conclusions ?

The deep unrest of unsatisfied souls meets its
earliest solace in the effective and sympathetic
expression of the same unrest from the lips of
another. To look it in the face is the first approach
to a sedative. To find our discontent with the actual,
our yearning for an undefined ideal, our aspiration
after impossible heights of being, shared and amplified
in the emotional speech of a man of genius, is the
beginning of consolation. Some of the most generous
spirits a hundred years ago found this in the eloquence
of Rousseau, and some of the most generous spirits
of this time and place have found it in the writer of
the Sartor. In ages not of faith, there will always be
multitudinous troops of people crying for the moon.
If such sorrowful pastime be ever permissible to men,
it has been natural and lawful this long while in
prse-revolutionary England, as it was natural and
lawful a century since in prae-revolutionary France.
A man born into a community where political forms,
from the monarchy down to the popular chamber,
are mainly hollow shams disguising the coarse supre-
macy of wealth, where religion is mainly official and
political, and is ever too ready to dissever itself alike
from the spirit of justice, the spirit of charity, and
the spirit of truth, and where literature does not as a
rule permit itself to discuss serious subjects frankly

CARLYLE. 153

and worthily1 — a community, in short, where the
great aim of all classes and orders with power is by
dint of rigorous silence, fast shutting of the eyes, and
stern stopping of the ears, somehow to keep the
social pyramid on its apex, with the fatal result of
preserving for England its glorious fame as a paradise
for the well-to-do, a purgatory for the able, and a
hell for the poor — why, a man born into all this with
a heart something softer than a flint, and with
intellectual vision something more acute than that
of a Troglodyte, may well be allowed to turn aside
and cry for moons for a season.

Impotent unrest, however, is followed in Mr. Car-
lyle by what is socially an impotent solution, just as
it was with Rousseau. To bid a man do his duty in
one page, and then in the next to warn him sternly
away from utilitarianism, from political economy,
from all ' theories of the moral sense,' and from any
other definite means of ascertaining what duty
may chance to be, is but a bald and naked counsel.
Spiritual nullity and material confusion in a society
are not to be repaired by a transformation of egotism,
querulous, brooding, marvelling, into egotism, active,
practical, objective, not uncomplacent. The moral
movements to which the instinctive impulses of human-
ity fallen on evil times uniformly give birth, early
Christianity, for instance, or the socialism of Rousseau,
may destroy a society, but they cannot save it unless
in conjunction with organising policy. A thorough
1 Written in 1870.

154 CARLYLE.

appreciation of fiscal and economic truths was at least
as indispensable for the life of the Roman Empire as
the acceptance of a Messiah ; and it was only in the
hands of a great statesman like Gregory VII. that
Christianity became at last an instrument powerful
enough to save civilisation. What the moral renova-
tion of Rousseau did for France we all know. Now
Rousseau's was far more profoundly social than the
doctrine of Mr. Carlyle, which, while in name a renun-
ciation of self, has all its foundations in the purest
individualism. Rousseau, notwithstanding the method
of Emile, treats man as a part of a collective whole,
contracting manifold relations and owing manifold
duties ; and he always appeals to the love and sym-
pathy which an imaginary God of nature has im-
planted in the heart. His aim is unity. Mr. Carlyle,
following the same method of obedience to his own
personal emotions, unfortified by patient reasoning,
lands at the other extremity, and lays all his stress
on the separatist instincts. The individual stands
alone confronted by the eternities ; between these and
his own sold exists the one central relation. This has
all the fundamental egotism of the doctrine of per-
sonal salvation, emancipated from fable, and varnished
with an emotional phrase. The doctrine has been
very widely interpreted, and without any forcing, as
a religious expression for the conditions of commer-
cial success.

• If we look among our own countrymen, we find
that the apostle of self-renunciation is nowhere so

CAELYLE. 155

beloved as by the best of those whom steady self-
reliance and thrifty self-securing and a firm eye to
the main chance have got successfully on in the
world. A Carlylean anthology, or volume of the
master's sentences, might easily be composed, that
should contain the highest form of private liturgy
accepted by the best of the industrial classes, masters
or men. They forgive or overlook the writer's de-
nunciations of Beaver Industrialisms, which they attri-
bute to his caprice or spleen. This is the worst of
an emotional teacher, that people take only so much
as they please from him, while with a reasoner they
must either refute by reason, or else they must
accept by reason, and not at simple choice. When
trade is brisk, and England is successfully com-
peting in the foreign markets, the books that enjoin
silence and self-annihilation have a wonderful popu-
larity in the manufacturing districts. This circum-
stance is honourable both to them and to him, as far
as it goes, but it furnishes some reason for suspecting
that our most vigorous moral reformer, so far from
propelling us in new grooves, has in truth only given
new firmness and coherency to tendencies that were
strongly marked enough in the national character
before. He has increased the fervour of the country,
but without materially changing its objects ; there is
all the less disguise among us as a result of his teach-
ing, but no radical modification of the sentiments
which people are sincere in. The most stirring
general appeal to the emotions, to be effective for

156 CARLYLE.

more than negative purposes, must lead up to definite
maxims and specific precepts. As a negative renova-
tion Mr. Carlyle's doctrine was perfect. It effectually
put an end to the mood of Byronism. May we say
that with the neutralisation of Byron, his most decisive
and special work came to an end 1 May we not say
further, that the true renovation of England, if such a
process be ever feasible, will lie in a quite other method
than this of emotion? It will lie not in more moral
earnestness only, but in a more open intelligence ;
not merely in a more dogged resolution to work and
be silent, but in a ready willingness to use the under-
standing. The poison of our sins, says Mr. Carlyle
in his latest utterance, ' is not intellectual dimness
chiefly, but torpid unveracity of heart.' Yes, but all
unveracity, torpid or fervid, breeds intellectual dim-
ness, and it is this last which prevents us from seeing
a way out of the present ignoble situation. "We need
light more than heat ; intellectual alertness, faith in
the reasoning faculty, accessibility to new ideas. To
refuse to use the intellect patiently and with system,
to decline to seek scientific truth, to prefer effusive in-
dulgence of emotion to the laborious and disciplined and
candid exploration of new ideas, is not this, too, a torpid
unveracity? And has not Mr. Carlyle, by the im-
patience of his method, done somewhat to deepen it 1
It is very well to invite us to moral reform, to
bring ourselves to be of heroic mind, as the surest
way to 'the blessed Aristocracy of the Wisest.' But
how shall we know the wisest when we see them, and

CAKLYLE. 157

how shall a nation know, if not by keen respect and
watchfulness for intellectual truth and the teachers of
it? Much as we may admire Mr. Carlyle's many
gifts, and highly as we may revere his character, it is
yet very doubtful whether anybody has as yet learnt
from him the precious lesson of scrupulosity and con-
scientiousness in actively and constantly using the
intelligence. This would have been the solid founda-
tion of the true hero-worship.

Let thus much have been said on the head of
temperament. The historic position also of every
writer is an indispensable key to many things in his
teaching.1 We have to remember in Mr. Carlyle's
case, that he was born in the memorable year when
the French Revolution, in its narrower sense, was
closed by the Whiff of Grape-shot, and when the
great century of emancipation and illumination was
ending darkly in battles and confusion. During his
youth the reaction was in full flow, and the lamp had
been handed to runners who not only reversed the
ideas and methods, but even turned aside from the
goal of their precursors. Hopefulness and enthusiastic
confidence in humanity when freed from the fetters
of spiritual superstition and secular tyranny, marked
all the most characteristic and influential speculations

1 The dates of Mr. Carlyle's principal compositions are these :
— Life of Schiller, 1825 ; Sartor Resartus, 1831 ; French Revolu-
tion, 1837 ; Chartism, 1839 ; Hero- Worship, 1840 ; Past and
Present, 1843 ; Cromwell, 1845 : Latter-Day Pamphlets, 1850 ;
Friedrich the Second, 1858-1865 ; Shooting Niagara, 1867.

/

158 CAELYLE.

of the two generations before '89. The appalling
failure which attended the splendid attempt to realise
these hopes in a renewed and perfected social struc-
ture, had no more than its natural effect in turning
men's minds back, not to the past of Rousseau's
imagination, but to the past of recorded history.
The single epoch in the annals of Europe since the
rise of Christianity, for which no good word could be
found, was the epoch of Voltaire. The hideousness
of the Christian church in the ninth and tenth
centuries was passed lightly over by men who had
only eyes for the moral obliquity of the church of the
Encyclopaedia. The brilliant but profoundly inade-
quate essays on Voltaire and Diderot were the out-
come in Mr. Carlyle of the same reactionary spirit.
Nobody now, we may suppose, who is competent to
judge, thinks that that estimate of ' the net product
of the tumultuous Atheism ' of Diderot and his fellow-
workers, is a satisfactory account of the influence and
significance of the Encyclopaedia ; nor that to sum up
Voltaire, with his burning passion for justice, his
indefatigable humanity, his splendid energy in intel-
lectual production, his righteous hatred of superstition,
as merely a supreme master of persiflage, can be a
process partaking of finality. The fact that to the
eighteenth century belong the subjects of more than
half of these thirty volumes, is a proof of the fascina-
tion of the period for an author who has never ceased
to vilipend it. The saying is perhaps as true in these
matters as of private relations, that hatred is not so

CAELYLE. 159

far removed from love as indifference is. Be that as
it may, the Carlylean view of the eighteenth century
as a time of mere scepticism and unbelief, is now
clearly untenable to men who remember the fervour
of Jean Jacques, and the more rational, but not any
less fervid faith of the disciples of Perfectibility.
But this was not so clear fifty years since, when the
crash and dust of demolition had not so subsided as
to let men see how much had risen up behind. The
fire of the new school had been taken from the very
conflagration which they execrated, but they were
not held back from denouncing the eighteenth century
by the reflection that, at any rate, its thought and
action had made ready the way for much of what is
best in the nineteenth.

Mr. Carlyle himself has told us about Coleridge,
and the movement of which Coleridge was the leader.
That movement has led men in widely different ways.
In one direction it has stagnated in the sunless swamps
of a theosophy, from which a cloud of sedulous
ephemera still suck a little spiritual moisture. In
another it led to the sacramental and sacerdotal
developments of Anglicanism. In a third, among
men with strong practical energy, to the benevolent
bluster of a sort of Christianity which is called
muscular because it is not intellectual. It would be
an error to suppose that these and the other streams
that have sprung from the same source, did not in the
days of their fulness fertilise and gladden many lands.
The wordy pietism of one school, the mimetic rites of

160 CARLYLE.

another, the romping heroics of the third, are de-
generate forms. How long they are likely to endure,
it would be rash to predict among a nation whose
established teachers and official preachers are pre-
vented by an inveterate timidity from trusting them-
selves to that disciplined intelligence, in which the
superior minds of the last century had such courageous
faith.

Mr. Carlyle drank in some sort at the same
fountain. Coleridgean ideas were in the air. It was
there probably that he acquired that sympathy with
the past, or with certain portions of the past, that
feeling of the unity of history, and that conviction of
the necessity of binding our theory of history fast
with our theory of other things, in all of which he so
strikingly resembles the great Anglican leaders of a
generation ago, and in gaining some of which so
strenuous an effort must have been needed to modify
the prepossessions of a Scotch Puritan education.
No one has contributed more powerfully to that
movement which, drawing force from many and
various sides, has brought out the difference between
the historian and the gazetteer or antiquary. One
half of Past and Present might have been written by
one of the Oxford chiefs in the days of the Tracts.
Vehement native force was too strong for such a man
to remain in the luminous haze which made the
Coleridgean atmosphere. A well-known chapter in
the Life of Sterling, which some, indeed, have found
too ungracious, shows how little hold he felt Coleridge's

CARLYLE. 161

ideas to be capable of retaining, and how little perma-
nent satisfaction resided in them. Coleridge, in fact,
was not only a poet but a thinker as well ; he had
science of a sort as well as imagination, but it was
not science for headlong and impatient souls. Mr.
Carlyle has probably never been able to endure a
subdivision all his life, and the infinite ramifications
of the central division between object and subject
might well be with him an unprofitable weariness to
the flesh.

In England, the greatest literary organ of the
Revolution was unquestionably Byron, whose genius,
daring, and melodramatic lawlessness, exercised what
now seems such an amazing fascination over the least
revolutionary of European nations. Unfitted for
scientific work and full of ardour, Mr. Carlyle found
his mission in rushing with all his might to the
annihilation of this terrible poet, who, like some
gorgon, hydra, or chimera dire planted at the gate,
carried off a yearly tale of youths and virgins from
the city. In literature, only a revolutionist can
thoroughly overpower a revolutionist. Mr. Carlyle
had fully as much daring as Byron ; his writing at
its best, if Avithout the many-eyed minuteness and
sustained pulsing force of Byron, has still the full
swell and tide and energy of genius : he is as lawless
in his disrespect for some things established. He had
the unspeakable advantage of being that which, though
not in this sense, only his own favourite word of con-
tempt describes, respectable ; and, for another thing,

VOL. I. M

162 CARLYLK

of being ruggedly sincere. Carlylism is the male
of Byronism. It is Byronism with thew and sinew,
bass pipe and shaggy bosom. There is the same
grievous complaint against the time and its men and
its spirit, something even of the same contemptuous
despair, the same sense of the puniness of man in the
centre of a cruel and frowning universe ; but there is
in Carlylism a deliverance from it all, indeed the only
deliverance possible. Its despair is a despair without
misery. Labour in a high spirit, duty done, and right
service performed in fortitudinous temper — here was,
not indeed a way out, but a way of erect living within.
Against Byronism the ordinary moralist and preacher
coidd really do nothing, because Byronism was an
appeal that lay in the regions of the mind only acces-
sible by one with an eye and a large poetic feeling for
the infinite whole of things. It was not the rebellion
only in Manfred, nor the wit in Don Juan, nor the
graceful melancholy of Childe Harold, which made their
author an idol, and still make him one to multitudes
of Frenchmen and Germans and Italians. One prime
secret of it is the air and spaciousness, the freedom
and elemental grandeur of Byron. Who has not felt
this to be one of the glories of Mr. Carlyle's work,
that it, too, is large and spacious, rich with the fulness
of a sense of things unknown and wonderful, and ever
in the tiniest part showing us the stupendous and
overwhelming whole? The magnitude of the universal
forces enlarges the pettiness of man, and the smallness
of his achievement and endurance takes a complexion

CAELYLE. 163

of greatness from the vague immensity that surrounds
and impalpably mixes with it.

Eemember further, that while in Byron the out-
come of this was rebellion, in Carlyle its outcome is
reverence, a noble mood, which is one of the highest *
predispositions of the English character. The instincts
of sanctification rooted in Teutonic races, and which
in the corrupt and unctuous forms of a mechanical
religious profession are so revolting, were mocked and
outraged, where they were not superciliously ignored,
in every line of the one, while in the other they were
enthroned under the name of Worship, as the very key
and centre of the right life. The prophet who never
wearies of declaring that ' only in bowing down before
the Higher does man feel himself exalted,' touched
solemn organ notes, that awoke a response from dim
religious depths, never reached by the stormy wailings
of the Byronic lyre. The political side of the rever-
ential sentiment is equally conciliated, and the prime
business of individuals and communities pronounced
to be the search after worthy objects of this divine
quality of reverence. While kings' cloaks and church
tippets are never spared, still less suffered to protect
the dishonour of ignoble wearers of them, the inade-
quateness of aggression and demolition, the necessity
of quiet order, the uncounted debt that we owe to
rulers and to all sorts of holy and great men who have
given this order to the world, all this brought repose
and harmony into spirits that the hollow thunders of
universal rebellion against tyrants and priests had

164 CAKLYLE.

worn into thinness and confusion. Again, at the
bottom of the veriest frondeur with English blood in
his veins, in his most defiant moment there lies a
conviction that after all something known as common
sense is the measure of life, and that to work hard is
a demonstrated precept of common sense. Carlylism
exactly hits this and brings it forward. We cannot
wonder that Byronism was routed from the field.

It may have been in the transcendently firm and
clear-eyed intelligence of Goethe that Mr. Carlyle first
found a responsive encouragement to the profoundly
positive impulses of his own spirit.1 There is, indeed,
a whole heaven betwixt the serenity, balance, and
bright composure of the one, and the vehemence,
passion, masterful wrath, of the other; arid the vast,
incessant, exact inquisitiveness of Goethe finds nothing-
corresponding to it in Mr. Carlyle's multitudinous
contempt and indifference, sometimes express and
sometimes only very significantly implied, for forms
of intellectual activity that do not happen to be
personally congenial. But each is a god, though the
one sits ever on Olympus, while the other is as one
from Tartarus. There is in each, besides all else, a

1 Positive. No English lexicon as yet seems to justify the
use of this word in one of the senses of the French positif, as
when a historian, for instance, speaks of the esprit positif of
Bonaparte. "We have no word, I believe, that exactly corre-
sponds, so perhaps positive with that significance will become
acclimatised. A distinct and separate idea of this particular
characteristic is indispensable.

CARLYLE. 165

certain remarkable directness of glance, an intrepid and
penetrating quality of vision, which defies analysis.
Occasional turgidity of phrase and unidiomatic hand-
ling of language do not conceal the simplicity of the
process by which Mr. Carlyle pierces through ob-
struction down to the abstrusest depths. And the
important fact is that this abstruseness is not verbal,
any more than it is the abstruseness of fog and cloud.
His epithet, or image, or trope, shoots like a sunbeam
on to the matter, throwing a transfigurating light,
even where it fails to pierce to its central core.

Eager for a firm foothold, yet wholly revolted by
the too narrow and unelevated positivity of the
eighteenth century ; eager also for some recognition
of the wide realm of the unknowable, yet wholly
unsatisfied by the transcendentalism of the English
and Scotch philosophic reactions ; he found in Goethe
that truly free and adequate positivity which accepts
all things as parts of a natural or historic order, and
while insisting on the recognition of the actual con-
ditions of this order as indispensable, and condemning
attempted evasions of such recognition as futile and
childish, yet opens an ample bosom for all forms of
beauty in art, and for all nobleness in moral aspiration.
That Mr. Carlyle has reached this high ground we do
not say. Temperament has kept him down from it.
But it is after this that he has striven. The tumid
nothingness of pure transcendentalism he has always
abhorred. Some of Mr. Carlyle's favourite phrases
have disguised from his readers the intensely practical

166 CARLYLE.

turn of his whole mind. His constant presentation
of the Eternities, the Immensities, and the like, has
veiled his almost narrow adherence to plain record
without moral comment, and his often cynical respect
for the dangerous, yet, when rightly qualified and
guided, the solid formula that What is, is. The
Eternities and Immensities are only a kind of awful
background. The highest souls are held to be deeply
conscious of these vast unspeakable presences, yet
even with them they are only inspiring accessories ;
the true interest lies in the practical attitude of such
men towards the actual and palpable circumstances
that surround them. This spirituality, whose place
in Mr. Carlyle's teaching has been so extremely mis-
stated, sinks wholly out of sight in connection with
such heroes as the coarse and materialist -Bonaparte,
of whom, however, the hero-worshipper in earlier
pieces speaks with some laudable misgiving, and the
not less coarse and materialist Frederick, about whom
no misgiving is permitted to the loyal disciple. The
admiration for military methods, on condition that
they are successful, for Mr. Carlyle, like Providence,
is always on the side of big and victorious battalions,
is the last outcome of a devotion to vigorous action
and practical effect, which no verbal garniture of a
transcendental kind can hinder us from perceiving to
be more purely materialist and unfeignedly brutal
than anything which sprung from the reviled thought
of the eighteenth century.

It is instructive to remark that another of the most

CAELYLE. 167

illustrious enemies of that century and all its works,
Joseph de Maistre, had the same admiration for the
effectiveness of war, and the same extreme interest
and concern in the men and things of war. He, too, de-
clares that 'the loftiest and most generous sentiments
are probably to be found in the soldier;' and that
war, if terrible, is divine and splendid and fascinating,
the manifestation of a sublime law of the universe.
We must, however, do De Maistre the justice to point
out, first, that he gave a measure of his strange interest
in Surgery and Judgment, as Mr. Carlyle calls it, to
the public executioner, a division of the honours of
social surgery which is no more than fair; while, in
the second place, he redeems the brutality of the
military surgical idea after a fashion, by an extra-
ordinary mysticism, which led him to see in war a
divine, inscrutable force, determining success in a
manner absolutely defying all the speculations of
human reason.1 The biographer of Frederick appar-
ently finds no inscrutable force at all, but only will,
tenacity, and powder kept dry. There is a vast
difference between this and the absolutism of the
mystic.

' Nature,' he says in one place, ' keeps silently a
most exact Savings-bank, and official register correct
to the most evanescent item, Debtor and Creditor, in
respect to one and all of us; silently marks down,
Creditor by such and such an unseen act of veracity
and heroism ; Debtor to such a loud blustery blunder,
1 Soirees de Saint Petersbourg, Ittme entrcticn.

168 CARLYLE.

twenty-seven million strong or one unit strong, and
to all acts and words and thoughts executed in
consequence of that — Debtor, Debtor, Debtor, day
after day, rigorously as Fate (for this is Fate that is
writing) ; and at the end of the account you will have
it all to pay, my friend.'1

That is to say, there is a law of recompense for
communities of men, and as nations sow, even thus
they reap. But what is Mr. Carlyle's account of the
precise nature and operation of this law? What is
the original distinction between an act of veracity
and a blunder? Why was the blow struck by the
Directory on the Eighteenth Fructidor a blunder, and
that struck by Bonaparte on the Eighteenth Brumaire
a veracity ? What principle of registration is that
which makes Nature debtor to Frederick the Second
for the seizure of Silesia, and Bonaparte debtor to
Nature for 'trampling on the world, holding it
tyrannously down?' It is very well to tell us that
' Injustice pays itself with frightful compound in-
terest,' but there are reasons for suspecting that Mr.
Carlyle's definition of the just and the unjust are
such as to reduce this and all his other sentences of
like purport to the level of mere truism and repetition.
If you secretly or openly hold that to be just and
veracious which is successful, then it needs no further
demonstration that penalties of ultimate failure are
exacted for injustice, because it is precisely the failure
that constitutes the injustice.

1 Latter-Day Pamphlets, No. V. p. 247.

CAKLYLE. 169

This is the kernel of all that is most retrograde in
Mr. Carlyle's teaching. He identifies the physical
with the moral order, confounds faithful conformity
to the material conditions of success, with loyal adher-
ence to virtuous rule and principle, and then appeals
to material triumph as the sanction of nature and the
ratification of high heaven. Admiring with pro-
foundest admiration the spectacle of an inflexible will,
when armed with a long-headed insight into means
and quantities and forces as its instrument, and yet
deeply revering the abstract ideal of justice ; dazzled
by the methods and the products of iron resolution,
yet imbued with traditional affection for virtue ; he
has seen no better way of conciliating both inclina-
tions than by insisting that they point in the same
direction, and that virtue and success, justice and
victory, merit and triumph, are in the long run all
one and the same thing. The most fatal of confusions.
Compliance with material law and condition ensures
material victory, and compliance with moral condition
ensures moral triumph ; but then moral triumph is as
often as not physical martyrdom. Superior military
virtues must unquestionably win the verdict of Fate,
Nature, Fact, and Veracity, on the battle-field, but
what then? Has Fate no other verdicts to record
than these? and at the moment while she writes
Nature down debtor to the conqueror, may she not
also have written her down his implacable creditor
for the moral cost of his conquest 1

The anarchy and confusion of Poland were an out--

170 CAKLYLE.

rage upon political conditions, which brought her to
dependence and ruin. The manner of the partition
was an outrage on moral conditions, for which each
of the nations that profited by it paid in the lawless-
ness of Bonaparte. The preliminaries of Leoben,
again, and Campo-Formio were the key to Waterloo
and St. Helena. But Mr. Carlyle stops short at the
triumph of compliance with the conditions of material
victory. He is content to know that Frederick made
himself master of Silesia, without considering that the
day of Jena loomed in front. It suffices to say that
the whiff of grape-shot on the Thirteenth Vendemiaire
brought Sans-culottism to order and an end, without
measuring what permanent elements of disorder were
ineradicably implanted by resort to the military arm.
Only the failures are used to point the great historical
moral, and if Bonaparte had died in the Tuileries in
all honour and glory, he would have ranked with
Frederick or Francia as a wholly true man. Mr.
Carlyle would then no more have declared the execu-
tion of Palm 'a palpable, tyrannous, murderous
injustice,' than he declares it of the execution of
Katte or Schlubhut. The fall of the traitor to fact,
of the French monarchy, of the windbags of the first
Republic, of Charles I., is improved for our edification,
but then the other lesson, the failure of heroes like
Cromwell, remains isolated and incoherent, with no
place in a morally regulated universe. If the strength
of Prussia now proves that Frederick had a right to
seize Silesia, and relieves us from inquiring further

CARLYLE. 171

whether he had any such right or not, why then
should not the royalist assume, from the fact of the
restoration, and the consequent obliteration of Crom-
well's work, that the Protector was a usurper and a
phantasm captain 1

Apart from its irreconcilableness with many of his
most emphatic judgments, Mr. Carlyle's doctrine
about Nature's registration of the penalties of injustice
is intrinsically an anachronism. It is worse than the
Catholic reaction, because while De Maistre only
wanted Europe to return to the system of the twelfth
century, Mr. Carlyle's theory of history takes us back
to times prehistoric, when might and right were the
same thing. It is decidedly natural that man in a
state of nature should take and keep as much as his
skill and physical strength enable him to do. But
society and its benefits are all so much ground won
from nature and her state. The more natural a
method of acquisition, the less likely is it to be social.
The essence of morality is the subjugation of nature
in obedience to social needs. To use Kant's admirable
description, concert pathologically extorted by the mere
necessities of situation, is exalted into a moral union.
It is exactly in this progressive substitution of one
for the other that advancement consists, that Progress
of the Species at which, in certain of itp forms, Mr.
Carlyle has so many gibes.

That, surely, is the true test of veracity and
heroism in conduct. Does your hero's achievement
go in the pathological or the moral direction 1 Does

172 CARLYLE.

it tend to spread faith in that cunning, violence,
force, which were once primitive and natural conditiona
of life, and which will still by natural law work to
their own proper triumphs in so far as these condi-
tions survive, and within such limits, and in such
sense, as they permit ; or, on the contrary, does it
tend to heighten respect for civic law, for pledged
word, for the habit of self-surrender to the public
good, and for all those other ideas and sentiments
and usages which have been painfully gained from
the sterile sands of egotism and selfishness, and to
which we are indebted for all the untold boons con-
ferred by the social union on man 1

Viewed from this point, the manner of the achieve-
ment is as important as is its immediate product, a
consideration which it is one of Mr. Carlyle's most
marked peculiarities to take into small account
Detesting Jesuitism from the bottom of his soul, he n
has been too willing to accept its fundamental maxim.. . _
that the end justifies the means. He has taken the
end for the ratification or proscription of the means,
and stamped it as the verdict of Fate and Fact on
the transaction and its doer. A safer position is this,
that the means prepare the end, and the end is what
the means have made it. Here is the limit of the
true law of the relations between man and fate.
Justice and injustice in the law, let us abstain from
inquiring after.

There are two sets of relations which have still to
be regulated in some degree by the primitive and

CARLYLE. 173

pathological principle of repression and main force.
The first of these concern that unfortunate body of
criminal and vicious persons, whose unsocial pro-
pensities are constantly straining and endangering
the bonds of the social union. They exist in the
midst of the most highly civilised communities, with
all the predatory or violent habits of barbarous tribes.
They are the active and unconquered remnant of the
natural state, and it is as unscientific as the experience
of some unwise philanthropy has shown it to be
ineffective, to deal with them exactly as if they occu-
pied the same moral and social level as the best of
their generation. We are amply justified in employing
towards them, wherever their offences endanger order,
the same methods of coercion which originally made
society possible. No tenable theory about free will
or necessity, no theory of praise and blame that will
bear positive tests, lays us under any obligation to
spare either the comfort or the life of a man who
indulges in certain anti-social kinds of conduct. Mr.
Carlyle has done much to wear this just and austere
view into the minds of his generation, and in so far
he has performed an excellent service.

The second set of relations in which the patho-
logical element still so largely predominates are those
between nations. Separate and independent com-
munities are still in a state of nature. The tie
between them is only the imperfect, loose, and non-
moral tie of self-interest and material power. Many
publicists and sentimental politicians are ever striving

174 CAELYLE.

to conceal this displeasing fact from themselves and
others, and evading the lesson of the outbreaks that
now and again convulse the civilised world. Mr.
Carlyle's history of the rise and progress of the power
of the Prussian monarchy is the great illustration of
the hold which he has got of the conception of the
international state as a state of nature; and here
again, in so far as he has helped to teach us to study
the past by historic methods, he has undoubtedly done
laudable work.

Yet have we not to confess that there is another
side to this kind of truth, in both these fields 1 We
may finally pronounce on a given way of thinking,
only after we have discerned its goaL Not knowing
this, we cannot accurately know its true tendency
and direction. Now, every recognition of the patho-
logical necessity should imply a progress and effort
towards its conversion into moral relationship. The
difference between a reactionary and a truly progres-
sive thinker or group of ideas is not that the one
assumes virtuousness and morality as having been the
conscious condition of international dealings, while
the other asserts that such dealings were the lawful
consequence of self-interest and the contest of material
forces ; nor is it that the one insists on viewing inter-
national transactions from the same moral point which
would be the right one, if independent communities
actually formed one stable and settled family, while
the other declines to view their morality at all. The
vital difference is, that while the reactionary writer

CAELYLE. 175

rigorously confines his faith within the region of facts
accomplished, the other anticipates a time when the
endeavour of the best minds in the civilised world,
co-operating with every favouring external circum-
stance that arises, shall have in the international
circle raised moral considerations to an ever higher
and higher pre-eminence, and in internal conditions
shall have left in the chances and training of the
individual, ever less and less excuse or grounds for
a predisposition to anti- social and barbaric moods.
This hopefulness, in some shape or other, is an indis-
pensable mark of the most valuable thought. To
stop at the soldier and the gibbet, and such order as
they can furnish, is to close the eyes to the entire
problem of the future, and we may be sure that what
omits the future is no adequate nor stable solution of
the present.

Mr. Carlyle's influence, however, was at its height
before this idolatry of the soldier became a paramount
article in his creed ; and it is devoutly to be hoped
that not many of those whom he first taught to seize
before all things fact and reality, will follow him into
this torrid air, where only forces and never principles
are facts, and where nothing is reality but the violent
triumph of arbitrarily imposed will. There was once
a better side to it all, when the injunction to seek
and cling to fact was a valuable warning not to waste
energy and hope in seeking lights which it is not
given to man ever to find, with a solemn assurance
added that in frank and untrembling recognition of

176 CARLYLE.

circumstance the spirit of man may find a priceless,
ever-fruitful contentment. The prolonged and thou-
sand-times repeated glorification of Unconsciousness,
Silence, Renunciation, all comes to this : We are to
leave the region of things unknowable, and hold fast
to the duty that lies nearest. Here is the Everlasting
Yea. In action only can we have certainty.

The reticences of men are often only less full of
meaning than their most pregnant speech; and Mr.
Carlyle's unbroken silence upon the modern validity
and truth of religious creeds says much. The fact
that he should have taken no distinct side in the
great debate as to revelation, salvation, inspiration,
and the other theological issues that agitate and
divide a community where theology is now mostly
verbal, has been the subject of some comment, and
has had the effect of adding one rather peculiar side
to the many varieties of his influence. Many in the
dogmatic stage have been content to think that as he
was not avowedly against them, he might be with
them, and sacred persons have been known to draw
their most strenuous inspirations from the chief de-
nouncer of phantasms and exploded formulas. Only
once, when speaking of Sterling's undertaking the
clerical burden, does he burst out into unmistakable
description of the old Jew stars that have now gone
out, and wrath against those who would persuade us
that these stars are still aflame and the only ones.
That this reserve has been wise in its day, and has

CAELYLE. 177

most usefully widened the tide and scope of the
teacher's popularity, one need not dispute. There
are conditions when indirect solvents are most power-
ful, as there are others, which these have done much
to prepare, when no lover of truth will stoop to de-
clarations other than direct. Mr. Carlyle has assailed
the dogmatic temper in religion, and this is work that
goes deeper than to assail dogmas.

Not even Comte himself has harder words for
metaphysics than Mr. Carlyle. ' The disease of
Metaphysics' is perennial. Questions of Death and
Immortality, Origin of Evil, Freedom and Necessity,
are ever appearing and attempting to shape something
of the universe. ' And ever unsuccessfully : for what
theorem of the Infinite can the Finite render com-
plete 1 . . . Metaphysical Speculation as it begins in
No or Nothingness, so it must needs end in nothing-
ness ; circulates and must circulate in endless vortices ;
creating, swallowing — itself.'1 Again, on the other
side, he sets his face just as firmly against the exces-
sive pretensions and unwarranted certitudes of the
physicist. 'The course of Nature's phases on this
our little fraction of a Planet is partially known to
us : but who knows what deeper courses these depend
on ; what infinitely larger Cycle (of causes) our little
Epicycle revolves on 1 To the Minnow every cranny

1 'Characteristics,' Misc. Ess., iii. pp. 356-358. Rousseau in
the same way makes the Savoyard Vicar declare that 'jamais
le jargon da la metaphysiquc n'a fait dicouvrir une seule verile,
et il a rempli la philosophic d'absurdites dont on a hontc, sitCt
qu'on les depouille de leurs grands mots. '—Emile, liv. iv.

VOL. I. n

178 CARLYLE.

and pebble, and quality and accident may have be-
come familiar ; but does the Minnow understand the
Ocean tides and periodic Currents, the Trade-winds,
and Monsoons, and Moon's Eclipses, by all which the
condition of its little Creek is regulated, and may,
from time to time ^^-miraculously enough) be quite
overset and reversed 1 Such a minnow is Man ; his
Creek this Planet Earth; his Ocean the immeasur-
able All J his Monsoons and periodic Currents the
mysterious course of Providence through ,ZEons of
iEons.'1 The inalterable relativity of human know-
ledge has never been more forcibly illustrated ; and
the two passages together fix the limits of that know-
ledge with a sagacity truly philosophic. Between the
vagaries of mystics and the vagaries of physicists
lies the narrow land of rational certainty, relative,
conditional, experimental, from which we view the
vast realm that stretches out unknown before us,
and perhaps for ever unknowable ; inspiring men with
an elevated awe, and environing the interests and
duties of their little lives with a strange sublimity.
' We emerge from the Inane ; haste stormfully across
the astonished Earth ; then plunge again into the
Inane. . . . But whence? 0 Heaven, whither? Sense
knows not ; Faith knows not ; only that it is through
Mystery to Mystery.'2

^Natural Supernaturalism, the title of one of the
cardinal chapters in Mr. Carlyle's cardinal book, is

1 Sartor Resartus, bk. iii. ch. viii. p. 249.
2 lb. p. 257.

CARLYLE. 179

perhaps as good a name as another for this two-faced
yet integral philosophy, which teaches us to behold
with cheerful serenity the great gulf which is fixed
round our faculty and existence on every side, while
it fills us with that supreme sense of countless unseen
possibilities, and of the hidden, undefined movements
of shadow and light over the spirit, without which the
soul of man falls into hard and desolate sterility. In
youth, perhaps, it is the latter aspect of Mr. Carlyle's
teaching which first touches people, because youth is
the time of indefinite aspiration ; and it is easier,
besides, to surrender ourselves passively to these
vague emotional impressions, than to apply actively
and contentedly to the duty that lies nearest, and to
the securing of 'that infinitesinmllest product' on
which the teacher is ever insisting. It is the Super-
naturalism which stirs men first, until larger fulness
of years and wider experience of life draw them to
a wise and not inglorious acquiescence in Naturalism.
Tin's last is the mood which Mr. Carlyle never wearies
of extolling and enjoining under the name of Belief ;
and the absence of it, the inability to enter into it, is
that Unbelief which he so bitterly vituperates, or,
in another phrase, that Discontent, which he charges
with holding the soul in such desperate and paralysing
bondage.

Indeed, what is it that Mr. Carlyle urges upon us
but the search for that Mental Freedom, which under
one name or another has been the goal and ideal of
all highest minds that have reflected on the true

180 CAELYLE.

constitution of human happiness 1 His often enjoined
Silence is the first condition of this supreme kind of-
liberty, for what is silence but the absence of a self-
tormenting assertiveness, the freedom from excessive
susceptibility under the speech of others, one's removal
from the choking sandy wilderness of wasted words 1
Belief is the mood which emancipates us from the
paralysing dubieties of distraught souls, and leaves us
full possession of ourselves by furnishing an unshaken
and inexpugnable base for action and thought, and
subordinating passion to conviction. Labour, again,
perhaps the cardinal article in the creed, is at once
the price of moral independence, and the first condition
of that fulness and accuracy of knowledge, without
which we are not free, but the bounden slaves of
prejudice, unreality, darkness, and error. Even Ke-
nunciation of self is in truth only the casting out of
those disturbing and masterful qualities which oppress
and hinder the free, natural play of the worthier
parts of character. In renunciation we thus restore
to self its own diviner mind.

Yet we are never bidden either to strive or hope
for a freedom that is unbounded. Circumstance has
fixed limits that no effort can transcend. Novalis
complained in bitter words, as we know, of the
mechanical, prosaic, utilitarian, cold-hearted character
of Wilhelm Meisfer, constituting it an embodiment of
'artistic Atheism,' while English critics as loudly
found fault with its author for being a mystic.
Exactly the same discrepancy is possible in respect of

CARLYLE. 181

Mr. Carlyle's own writings. In one sense he may be
called mystic and transcendental, in another baldly
mechanical and even cold-hearted, just as Nova! is
found Goethe to be in Meister. The latter impression
is inevitable in all who, like Goethe and like Mr.
Carlyle, make a lofty acquiescence in the positive
course of circumstance a prime condition at once of
wise endeavour and of genuine happiness. The
splendid fire and unmeasured vehemence of Mr.
Carlyle's manner partially veil the depth of this
acquiescence, which is really not so far removed from
fatalism. The torrent of his eloquence, bright and
rushing as it is, flows between rigid banks and over
hard rocks. Devotion to the heroic does not prevent
the assumption of a tone towards the great mass of
the unheroic, which implies that they are no more
than two-legged mill horses, ever treading a fixed and
unalterable round. He practically denies other con-
solation to mortals than such as they may be able to
get from the final and conclusive Kismet of the
oriental. It is fate. Man is the creature of his
destiny. As for our supposed claims on the heavenly
powers : What right, he asks, hadst thou even to be 1
Fatalism of this stamp is the natural and unavoidable
issue of a born positivity of spirit, uninformed by
scientific meditation. It exists in its coarsest and
most childish kind in adventurous freebooters of the
type of Napoleon, and in a noble and not egotistic kind
in Oliver Cromwell's pious interpretation of the order
of events by the good will and providence of God.

182 CAKLYLE.

Two conspicuous qualities of Carlylean doctrine
flow from this fatalism, or poetised utilitarianism, or
illumined positivity. One of them is a tolerably
constant contempt for excessive nicety in moral
distinctions, and an aversion to the monotonous
attitude of praise and blame. In a country overrun
and corroded to the heart, as Great Britain is, with
cant and a foul mechanical hypocrisy, this temper
ought to have had its uses in giving a much-needed
robustness to public judgment. One might suppose,
from the tone of opinion among us, not only that the
difference between right and wrong marks the most
important aspect of conduct, which would be true ;
but that it marks the only aspect of it that exists, or
that is worth considering, which is most profoundly
false. Nowhere has Puritanism done us more harm
than in thus leading us to take all breadth, and
colour, and diversity, and fine discrimination, out of
our judgments of men, reducing them to thin, narrow,
and superficial pronouncements upon the letter of
their morality, or the precise conformity of their
opinions to accepted standards of truth, religious or
other. Among other evils which it has inflicted, this
inability to conceive of conduct except as either right
or wrong, and, correspondingly in the intellectual
order, of teaching except as either true or false, is at
the bottom of that fatal spirit of parti-pris which has
led to the rooting of so much injustice, disorder,
immobility, and darkness in English intelligence. No
excess of moralit}^ we may be sure, has followed this

CAELYLE. 183

excessive adoption of the exclusively moral standard.
' Quand U n'y a plus de principes dans le coeur,' says
De Senancourt, ' on est Men scrupuleuz sur les apparences
publigues et sur les devoirs d'opinion.' We have simply
got for our pains a most unlovely leanness of judgment,
and ever since the days when this temper set in until
now, when a wholesome rebellion is afoot, it has
steadily and powerfully tended to straiten character,
to make action mechanical, and to impoverish art.
As if there were nothing admirable in a man save
unbroken obedience to the letter of the moral law,
and that letter read in our own casual and local
interpretation; and as if we had no faculties of
sympathy, no sense for the beauty of character, no
feeling for broad force and full-pulsing vitality.

To study manners and conduct and men's moral
nature in such a way, is as direct an error as it woidd
be to overlook in the study of his body everything
except its vertebral column and the bony framework.
The body is more than mere anatomy. A character
is much else besides being virtuous or vicious. In
many of the characters in which some of the finest
and most singular qualities of humanity would seem
to have reached their furthest height, their morality
was the side least worth discussing. The same may be
said of the specific Tightness or wrongness of opinion
in the intellectual order. Let us condemn error or
immorality, when the scope of our criticism calls for
this particular function, but why rush to praise or
blame, to eulogy or reprobation, when we should do

184 * CAELYLE.

better simply to explore and enjoy? Moral imper-
fection is ever a grievous curtailment of life, but many
exquisite flowers of character, many gracious and
potent things, may still thrive in the most disordered
scene.

The vast waste which this limitation of prospect
entails is the most grievous rejection of moral treasure,
if it be true that nothing enriches the nature like
wide sympathy and many-coloured appreciativeness.
To a man like Macaulay, for example, criticism was
only a tribunal before which men were brought to be
decisively tried by one or two inflexible tests, and
then sent to join the sheep on the one hand, or the
goats on the other. His pages are the record of
sentences passed, not the presentation of human
characters in all their fulness and colour; and the
consequence is that even now and so soon, in spite of
all their rhetorical brilliance, their hold on men has
grown slack. Contrast the dim depths into which his
essay on Johnson is receding, with the vitality as of
a fine dramatic creation which exists in Mr. Carlyle's •
essay on the same man. Mr. Carlyle knows as well
as Macaulay how blind and stupid a creed was English
Toryism a century ago, but he seizes and reproduces
the character of his man, and this was much more
than a matter of a creed. So with Burns. He was
drunken and unchaste and thriftless, and Mr. Carlyle
holds all these vices as deeply in reprobation as if he
had written ten thousand sermons against them ; but
he leaves the fulmination to the hack moralist of the

CAKLYLE. 185

pulpit or the press, with whom words are cheap,
easily gotten, and readily thrown forth. To him it
seems better worth while, having made sure of some
sterling sincerity and rare genuineness of vision and
singular human quality, to dwell on, and do justice to
that, than to accumulate commonplaces as to the
viciousness of vice. Here we may perhaps find the
explanation of the remarkable fact that though Mr.
Carlyle has written about a large number of men of
all varieties of opinion and temperament, and written
with emphasis and point and strong feeling, yet there
is hardly one of these judgments, however much we
may dissent from it, which we could fairly put a finger
upon as indecently absurd or futile. Of how many
writers of thirty volumes can we say the same ?

That this broad and poetic temper of criticism has
special dangers, and needs to have special safeguards,
is but too true. Even, however, if we find that it
has its excesses, we may forgive much to the merits
of a reaction against a system which has raised
monstrous floods of sour cant round about us, and
hardened the hearts and parched the sympathies of
men by blasts from theological deserts. There is a
point of view so lofty and so peculiar that from it we
are able to discern in men and women something
more than, and apart from, creed and profession and
formulated principle; which indeed directs and colours
this creed and principle as decisively as it is in its
turn acted on by them, and this is their character or
humanity. The least important thing about Johnson

186 CAELYLE.

is that he was a Tory; and about Burns, that he
drank too much and was incontinent ; and if we see
in modern literature an increasing tendency to mount
to this higher point of view, this humaner prospect,
there is no living writer to whom we owe more for it
than Mr. Carlyle. The same principle which revealed
the valour and godliness of Puritanism, has proved
its most efficacious solvent, for it places character on
the pedestal where Puritanism places dogma.

The second of the qualities which seem to flow
from Mr. Carlyle's fatalism, and one much less useful
among such a people as the English, is a deficiency
of sympathy with masses of men. It would be easy
enough to find places where he talks of the dumb
millions in terms of fine and sincere humanity, and
his feeling for the common pathos of the human lot,
as he encounters it in individual lives, is as earnest
and as simple, as it is invariably lovely and touching
in its expression. But detached passages cannot
counterbalance the effect of a whole compact body
of teaching. The multitude stands between Destiny
on the one side, and the Hero on the other ; a sport
to the first, and as potter's clay to the second.
''Dogs, would ye then live for ever?' Frederick is truly
or fabulously said to have cried to a troop who
hesitated to attack a battery vomiting forth death
and destruction. This is a measure of Mr. Carlyle's
own valuation of the store we ought to set on the
lives of the most. We know in what coarse outcome

CARLYLE. 187

such an estimate of the dignity of other life than the
life heroic has practically issued ; in what harharous
vindication of barbarous law-breaking in Jamaica, in
what inhuman softness for slavery, in what contemp-
tuous and angry words for 'Beales and his 50,000
roughs,' contrasted with gentle words for our precious
aristocracy, with 'the politest and gracefullest kind
of woman ' to wife. Here is the end of the Eternal
Verities, when one lets them bulk so big in his eyes
as to shut out that perishable speck, the human race.
1 They seem to have seen, these brave old North-
men,' he saj^s in one place, 'what Meditation has
taught all men in all ages, that this world is after all
but a show — a phenomenon or appearance, no real
thing. All deep souls see into that.11 Yes; but
deep souls dealing with the practical questions of
society, do well to thrust the vision as far from them
as they can, and to suppose that this world is no
show, and happiness and misery not mere appearances,
but the keenest realities that we can know. The
difference between virtue and vice, between wisdom
and folly, is only phenomenal, yet there is difference
enough. ' TVJiat shadows we are, and what shadows we
pursueT Burke cried in the presence of an affecting
incident. Yet the consciousness of this made him
none the less careful, minute, patient, systematic, in
examining a policy, or criticising a tax. Mr. Carlyle,
on the contrary, falls back on the same reflection
for comfort in the face of political confusions and
1 Hero- Worship, p. 43.

188 CARLYLE.

difficulties and details, which he has not the moral
patience to encounter scientifically. Unable to dream
of swift renovation and wisdom among men, he
ponders on the unreality of life, and hardens his
heart against generations that will not know the
things that pertain unto their peace. He answers
to one lifting up some moderate voice of protest in
favour of the masses of mankind, as his Prussian
hero did : lAh, you do not know that damned race Z'1

There is no passage which Mr. Carlyle so often
quotes as the sublime —

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on ; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

If the ever present impression of this awful, most
moving, yet most soothing thought, be a law of
spiritual breadth and height, there is still a peril in
it. Such an impression may inform the soul with a
devout mingled sense of grandeur and nothingness, or
it may blacken into cynicism and antinomian living
for self and the day. It may be a solemn and holy
refrain, sounding far off but clear in the dusty course
of work and duty ; or it may be the comforting
chorus of a diabolic drama of selfishness and violence.
As a reaction against religious theories which make
humanity over -abound in self -consequence, and fill
individuals with the strutting importance of creatures
with private souls to save or lose, even such cynicism
1 Carlyle's Frederick, vi. 363.

CARLYLE. 189

as Byron's was wholesome and nearly forgivable.
Nevertheless, the most important question that we can
ask of any great teacher, as of the walk and conversa-
tion of any commonest person, remains this — how far
has he strengthened and raised the conscious and
harmonious dignity of humanity ; how stirred in men
and women, many or few, deeper and more active
sense of the worth and obligation and innumerable
possibilities, not of their own little lives, one or another,
but of life collectively ; how heightened the self-
respect of the race ? There is no need to plant oneself
in a fool's paradise, with no eye for the weakness of
men, the futility of their hopes, the irony of their
fate, the dominion of the satyr and the tiger in their
hearts. Laughter has a fore-place in life. All this
we may see and show that we see, and yet so throw
it behind the weightier facts of nobleness and sacrifice,
of the boundless gifts which fraternal union has given,
and has the power of giving, as to kindle in every
breast, not callous to exalted impressions, the glow of
sympathetic endeavour, and of serene exultation in the
bond that makes ' precious the soul of man to man.'

This renewal of moral energy by spiritual contact
with the mass of men, and by meditation on the
destinies of mankind, is the very reverse of Mr.
Carlyle's method. With him, it is good to leave the
mass, and fall down before the individual, and be
saved by him. The victorious hero is the true Para-
clete. 'Nothing so lifts a man from all his mean
imprisonments, were it but for moments, as true

1 90 CARLYLE.

admiration.' And this is really the kernel of the
Carlylean doctrine. The whole human race toils and
moils, straining and energising, doing and suffering
things multitudinous and unspeakable under the sun,
in order that like the aloe -tree it may once in a
hundred years produce a flower. It is this hero
that age offers to age, and the wisest worship him.
Time and nature once and again distil from out of the
lees and froth of common humanity some wondrous
character, of a potent and reviving property hardly
short of miraculous. This the man who knows his
own good cherishes in his inmost soul as a sacred
thing, an elixir of moral life. The Great Man is
'the light which enlightens, which has enlightened
the darkness of the world ; a flowing light fountain,
in whose radiance all souls feel that it is well with
them.' This is only another form of the anthropo-
morphic conceptions .of deity. The divinity of the
ordinary hierophant is clothed in the minds of the
worshippers with the highest human qualities they
happen to be capable of conceiving, and this is the
self-acting machinery by which worship refreshes and
recruits what is best in man. Mr. Carlyle has another
way. He carries the process a step further, giving
back to the great man what had been taken for
beings greater than any man, and summoning us to
trim the lamp of endeavour at the shrine of heroic
chiefs of mankind. In that house there are many
mansions, the boisterous sanctuary of a vagabond
polytheism. But each altar is individual and apart,

CARLYLE. 191

and the reaction of this isolation upon the egotistic
instincts of the worshipper has been only too evident.
It is good for us to build temples to great names
which recall special transfigurations of humanity ; but
it is better still, it gives a firmer nerve to purpose and
adds a finer holiness to the ethical sense, to carry ever
with us the unmarked, yet living tradition of the
voiceless unconscious effort of unnumbered millions of
souls, flitting lightly away like showers of thin leaves,
yet ever augmenting the elements of perfectness in
man, and exalting the eternal contest.

Mr. Carlyle has indeed written that generation
stands indissolubly woven with generation ; ' how we
inherit, not Life only, but all the garniture and form
of Life, and work and speak, and even think and feel,
as our fathers and primeval grandfathers from the
beginning have given it to us;' how 'mankind is a
living, indivisible whole.'1 Even this, however, with
the 'literal communion of saints,' which follows in
connection with it, is only a detached suggestion, not
incorporated with the body of the writer's doctrine.
It does not neutralise the general lack of faith in the
cultivable virtue of masses of men, nor the universal tone
of humoristic cynicism with which all but a little band,
the supposed salt of the earth, are treated. Man is
for Mr. Carlyle, as for the Calvinistic theologian, a
fallen and depraved being, without much hope, except
for a few of the elect. The best thing that can happen
to the poor creature is that he should be thoroughly
1 ' Organic Filaments ' in the Sartor, bk. iiL cb. vii.

192 CARLYLE.

well drilled. I other words, society does not really
progress in its bulk; and the methods which were
conditions of the original formation and growth of
the social union, remain indispensable until the sound
of the last trump. Was there not a profound and
far-reaching truth wrapped up in Geothe's simple yet
really inexhaustible monition, that if we Avould improve
a man, it were well to let him believe that we already
think him that which we would have him to be. The
law that noblesse oblige has unwritten bearings in deal-
ing with all men ; all masses of men are susceptible
of an appeal from that point : for this Mr. Carlyle
seems to make no allowance.

Every modification of society is one of the slow
growths of time, and to hurry impatiently after them
by swift ways of military discipline and peremptory
law-making, is only to clasp the near and superficial
good. It is easy to make a solitude and call it peace,
to plant an iron heel and call it order. But read Mr.
Carlyle's essay on Dr. Francia, and then ponder the
history of Paraguay for these later years and the
accounts of its condition in the newspapers of to-day.
'Nay, it may be,' we learn from that remarkable
piece, 'that the benefit of him is not even yet ex-
hausted, even yet entirely become visible. Who
knows but, in unborn centuries, Paragueno men will
look back to their lean iron Francia, as men do in
such cases to the one veracious person, and institute
considerations?'1 Who knows, indeed, if only it
1 Misc. Ess. vi. 124.

CAKLYLE. 193

prove that their lean iron Francia, in his passion for
order and authority, did not stamp out the very life
of the nation 1 Where organic growths are concerned,
patience is the sovereign law ; and where the organism
is a society of men, the vital principle is a sense in
one shape or another of the dignity of humanity.
The recognition of this tests the distinction between
the truly heroic ruler of the stamp of Cromwell, and
the arbitrary enthusiast for external order like Fre-
derick. Yet in more than one place Mr. Carlyle
accepts the fundamental principle of democracy. ' It
is curious to consider now,' he says once, ' with what
fierce, deep-breathed doggedness the poor English
Nation, drawn by their instincts, held fast upon it
[the Spanish War of Walpole's time, in Jenkins' Ear
Question], and would take no denial of it, as if they
had surmised and seen. For the instincts of simple,
guileless persons (liable to be counted stupid by the
unwary) are sometimes of prophetic nature, and spring
from the deep places of this universe !' l If the writer
of this had only thought it out to the end, and applied
the conclusions thereof to history and politics, what a
difference it would have made.

No criticism upon either Mr. Carlyle or any other
modern historian, possessed of speculative quality,
would be in any sense complete which should leave
out of sight his view of the manner and significance
of the break-up of the old European structure. The

1 Frederick, iv. 390.
VOL. I. O

194 CARLYLE.

historian is pretty sure to be guided in his estimate
of the forces which have contributed to dissolution in
the past, by the kind of anticipation which he enter-
tains of the probable course of reconstruction. Like
Comte, in his ideas of temporal reconstruction, Mr.
Carlyle goes back to something like the forms of
feudalism for the model of the industrial organisation
of the future ; but in the spiritual order he is as far
removed as possible from any semblance of that re-
vival of the old ecclesiastical forms without the old
theological ideas, which is the corner-stone of Comte's
edifice. To the question whether mankind gained or
lost by the French Revolution, Mr. Carlyle nowhere
gives a clear answer ; indeed, on this subject more
even than any other, he clings closely to his favourite
method of simple presentation, streaked with dramatic
irony. No writer shows himself more alive to the
enormous moment to all Europe of that transaction ;
but we hear no word from him on the question whether
we have more reason to bless or curse an event that
interrupted, either subsequently to retard or to accele-
rate, the transformation of the West from a state of
Avar, of many degrees of social subordination, of reli
gious privilege, of aristocratic administration, into
a state of peaceful industry, of equal international
rights, of social equality, of free and equal tolerance
of creeds. That this process was going on prior to
1789 is undeniable. Are we really nearer to the per-
manent establishment of the new order, for what was
done between 1789 and 1793 1 or were men thrown off

CAELYLE. 195

the right track of improvement by a movement which
turned exclusively on abstract rights, which dealt
with men's ideas and habits as if they were instan-
taneously pliable before the aspirations of any govern-
ment, and which by its violent and inconsiderate
methods drove all these who should only have been
friends of order into being the enemies of progress as
well ? There are many able and honest and republican
men who in their hearts suspect that the latter of
the two alternatives is the more correct description
of what has happened. Mr. Carlyle is as one who
does not hear the question. He draws its general
moral lesson from the French Revolution, and with
clangorous note warns all whom it concerns, from
king to churl, that imposture must come to an end.
But for the precise amount and kind of dissolution
which the West owes to it, for the political meaning
of it, as distinguished from its moral or its dramatic
significance, we seek in vain, finding no word on the
subject, nor even evidence of consciousness that such
word is needed.

The truth is that with Mr. Carlyle the Revolution
begins not in 1789 but in 1741 ; not with the Fall of
the Bastile but with the Battle of Mollwitz. This
earliest of Frederick's victories was the first sign
' that indeed a new hour had struck on the Time
Horologe, that a new Epoch had arisen. Slumberous
Europe, rotting amid its blind pedantries, its lazy
hypocrisies, conscious and unconscious : this man is
capable of shaking it a little out of its stupid refuges

196 CARLYLE.

of lies and ignominious wrappages, and of intimating
to it afar off that there is still a Veracity in Things,
and a Mendacity in Sham Things,' and so forth, in the
well-known strain.1 It is impossible to overrate the
truly supreme importance of the violent break-up of
Europe which followed the death of the Emperor
Charles VI., and in many respects 1740 is as important
a date in the history of Western societies as 1789.
Most of us would probably find the importance of
this epoch in its destructive contribution, rather than
in that constructive and moral quality which lay
under the movement of '89. The Empire was thor-
oughly shattered. France was left weak, impoverished,
humiliated. Spain was finally thrust from among the
efficient elements in the European State-system. Most
important of all, their too slight sanctity had utterly
left the old conceptions of public law and international
right. The whole polity of Europe was left in such
a condition of disruption as had not been equalled
since the death of Charles the Great. The Partition
of Poland was the most startling evidence of the
completeness of this disruption, and if one statesman
was more to be praised or blamed for shaking over
the fabric than another, that statesman was Frederick
the Second of Prussia. But then, in Mr. Carlyle's
belief, there was equally a constructive and highly
moral side to all this. The old fell to pieces because
it was internally rotten. The gospel of the new was

1 History of Frederick the Great, iv. 328. See also vol. i.,
Proem.

CARLYLE. 197

that the government of men and kingdoms is a busi-
ness beyond all others demanding an open-eyed acces-
sibility to all facts and realities ; that here more than
anywhere else you need to give the tools to him who
can handle them ; that government does by no means
go on of itself, but more than anything else in this
world demands skill, patience, energy, long and tena-
cious grip, and the constant presence of that most
indispensable, yet most rare, of all practical convictions,
that the effect is the inevitable consequent of the
cause. Here was a revolution, we cannot doubt.
The French Eevolution was in a manner a complement
to it, as Mr. Carlyle himself says in a place where he
talks of believing both in the French Eevolution and
in Frederick ; ' that is to say both that Eeal Kingship
is eternally indispensable, and also that the destruction
of Sham Kingship (a frightful process) is occasionally
so.'1 It is curious that an observer who could see
the positive side of Frederick's disruption of Europe
in 1740, did not also see that there was a positive side
to the disruption of the French monarchy fifty years
afterwards, and that not only was a blow dealt to sham
kingship, but a decisive impulse was given to those
ideas of morality and justice in government, upon which
only real kingship in whatever form is able to rest.

As to the other great factor in the dissolution of
the old state, the decay of ancient spiritual forms,
Mr. Carlyle gives no uncertain sound. Of the Eefor-
1 Frederick the Great, i. 9.

198 CARLYLE.

mation, as of the French Revolution, philosophers
have doubted how far it really contributed to the
stable progress of European civilisation. Would it
have been better, if it had been possible, for the old
belief gradually as by process of nature to fall to
pieces, new doctrine as gradually and as normally
emerging from the ground of disorganised and decayed
convictions, without any of that frightful violence
which stirred men's deepest passions, and gave them
a sinister interest in holding one or other of the rival
creeds in its most extreme, exclusive, and intolerant
form 1 This question Mr. Carlyle does not see, or, if
he does see it, he rides roughshod over it. Every
reader remembers the notable passage in which he
declares that the question of Protestant or 'not Pro-
testant meant everywhere, 'Is there anything of
nobleness in you, 0 Nation, or is there nothing V
and that afterwards it fared with nations as they did,
or did not, accept this sixteenth century form of
Truth when it came.1

France, for example, is the conspicuous proof of
what overtook the deniers. 'France saw good to
massacre Protestantism, and end it, in the night of
St. Bartholomew, 1572. The celestial apparitor of
heaven's chancery, so we may speak, the genius of
Fact and Veracity, had left his writ of summons ;
writ was read and replied to in this manner.' But
let us look at this more definitely. A complex series
of historic facts do not usually fit so neatly into the
1 Frederick, i. bk. iii. ch. viii. 269-274.

CAKLYLE. 199

moral formula. The truth surely is that while the
anxieties and dangers of the Catholic party in France
increased after St. Bartholomew, whose dramatic
horror has made its historic importance to be vastly
exaggerated, the Protestant cause remained full of
vitality, and the number of its adherents went on
increasing until the Edict of Nantes. It is eminently
unreasonable to talk of France seeing good to end
Protestantism in a night, when we reflect that twenty-
six years after, the provisions of the Edict of Nantes
were what they were. ' By that Edict,' the historian
tells us, 'the French Protestants, who numbered
perhaps a tenth of the total population, 2,000,000 out
of 20,000,000, obtained absolute liberty of conscience;
performance of public worship in 3500 castles, as
well as in certain specified houses in each province ;
a State endowment equal to £20,000 a year; civil
rights equal in every respect to those of the Catholics;
admission to the public colleges, hospitals, etc. ; finally,
eligibility to all offices of State.' It was this, and
not the Massacre, which was France's reply to the
Genius of Fact and Veracity. Again, on the other
side, England accepted Protestantism, and yet Mr.
Carlyle of all men can hardly pretend, after his
memorable deliverances in the Niagara, that he thinks
she has fared particularly well in consequence.

The famous diatribe against Jesuitism in the
Latter-Dai/ Pamphlets,1 one of the most unfeignedly
coarse and virulent bits of invective in the language,
1 No. VIII. pp. 353-371.

200 CAKLYLE.

points plumb in the same direction. It is grossly
unjust, because it takes for granted that Loyola and
all Jesuits were deliberately conscious of imposture
and falsehood, knowingly embraced the cause of
Beelzebub, and resolutely propagated it. It is one
thing to judge a system in its corruption, and a quite
other thing to measure the worth and true design of
its first founders ; one thing to estimate the intention
and sincerity of a movement, when it first stirred the
hearts of men, and another thing to pass sentence
upon it in the days of its degradation. The vileness
into which Jesuitism eventually sank is a poor reason
why we should malign and curse those who, centuries
before, found in the rules and discipline and aims of
that system an acceptable expression for their own
disinterested social aspirations. It is childish to say
that the subsequent vileness is a proof of the existence
of an inherent corrupt principle from the beginning ;
because hitherto certainly, and probably it will be so
for ever, even the most salutary movements and most
effective social conceptions have been provisional. In
other words, the ultimate certainty of dissolution does
not nullify the beauty and strength of physical life,
and the putrescence of Jesuit methods and ideas is
no more a reproach to those who first found succour
in them, than the cant and formalism of any other
degenerate form of active faith, say monachism or
Calvinism, prove Calvin or Benedict or Bernard to
have been hypocritical and hollow. To be able, how-
ever, to take this reasonable view, one must be unable

CARLYLE. 201

to believe that men can be drawn for generation after
generation by such a mere hollow lie and villainy and
' light of hell ' as Jesuitism has always been, accord-
ing to Mr. Carlyle's rendering. Human nature is not
led for so long by lies ; and if it seems to be otherwise,
let us be sure that ideas which do lead and attract
successive generations of men to self-sacrifice and care
for social interests, must contain something which is
not wholly a lie.

Perhaps it is pertinent to remember that Mr.
Carlyle, in fact, is a prophet with a faith, and he holds
the opposition kind of religionist in a peculiarly theo-
logical execration. In spite of his passion for order,
he cannot understand the political point of view.
The attempts of good men in epochs of disorder to
remake the past, to bring back an old spiritual system
and method, because that did once at any rate give
shelter to mankind, and peradventure may give it to
them again until better times come, are phenomena
into which he cannot look with calm or patience.
The great reactionist is a type that is wholly dark to
him. That a reactionist can be great, can be a lover
of virtue and truth, can in any sort contribute to the
welfare of men, these are possibilities to which he
will lend no ear. In a word, he is a prophet and not
a philosopher, and it is fruitless to go to him for help
in the solution of philosophic problems. This is not
to say that he may not render us much help in those
far more momentous problems which affect the
guidance of our own lives.

BYRON.

It is one of the singular facts in the history of
literature, that the most rootedly conservative country
in Europe should have produced the poet of the
Revolution. Nowhere is the antipathy to principles
and ideas so profound, nor the addiction to moderate
compromise so inveterate, nor the reluctance to
advance away from the past so unconquerable, as
in England ; and nowhere in England is there so
settled an indisposition to regard any thought or
sentiment except in the light of an existing social
order, nor so firmly passive a hostility to generous
aspirations, as in the aristocracy. Yet it was pre-
cisely an English aristocrat who became the favourite
poet of all the most high-minded conspirators and
socialists of continental Europe for half a century ;
of the best of those, that is to say, who have borne
the most unsparing testimony against the present
ordering of society, and against the theological and
moral conceptions which have guided and maintained
it. The rank and file of the army has been equally
inspired by the same fiery and rebellious strains
against the order of God and the order of man.

204 BYEON.

' The day will come,' wrote Mazzini, thirty years ago,
' when Democracy will remember all that it owes tc
Byron. England, too, will, I hope, one day remember
the mission — so entirely English yet hitherto over-
looked by her — which Byron fulfilled on the Continent;
the European role given by him to English literature,
and the appreciation and sympathy for England which
he awakened amongst us. Before he came, all that
was known of English literature was the French
translation of Shakespeare, and the anathema hurled
by Voltaire against the " drunken savage." It is since
Byron that we Continentalists have learned to study
Shakespeare and other English writers. From him
dates the sympathy of all the true-hearted amongst
us for this land of liberty, whose true vocation he so
worthily represented among the oppressed. He led
the genius of Britain on a pilgrimage throughout all
Europe.'1

The day of recollection has not yet come. It is
only in his own country that Byron's influence has
been a comparatively superficial one, and its scope
and gist dimly and imperfectly caught, because it is

1 See also George Sand's Preface to Obermann, p. 10. ' En
mime temps que les institutions et les coutumes, la literature
anglaise passa le ddtroit, et vint regner chez nous. La poesic
britannique nous rivila le doute incarni sous la figure de Byron ;
puis la littirature allcmande, quoique plus mystique, nous con-
dtiisit au mime risultat par un sentiment de reverie plus pro-
fond. '

The number of translations that have appeared in Germany
since 1830 proves the coincidence of Byronic influence with
revolutionary movement in that country.

BYRON. 205

only in England that the partisans of order hope to
mitigate or avoid the facts of the Revolution by
pretending not to see them, while the friends of
progress suppose that all the fruits of change shall
inevitably fall, if only they keep the forces and
processes and extent of the change rigorously private
and undeclared. That intense practicalness which
seems to have done so many great things for us, and
yet at the same moment mysteriously to have robbed
us of all, forbids us even to cast a glance at what is
no more than an aspiration. Englishmen like to be
able to answer about the Revolution as those ancients
answered about the symbol of another Revolution,
when they said that they knew not so much as
whether there were a Holy Ghost or not. The same
want of kindling power in the national intelligence
which made of the English Reformation one of the
most sluggish and tedious chapters in our history,
has made the still mightier advance of the moderns
from the social system and spiritual bases of the old
state, in spite of our two national achievements of
punishing a king with death and emancipating our
slaves, just as unimpressive and semi-efficacious a
performance in this country, as the more affrontingly
hollow and halt-footed transactions of the sixteenth
century.

Just because it was wonderful that England should
have produced Byron, it would have been wonderful
if she had received any permanently deep impression
from him, or preserved a lasting appreciation of his

206 BYEON.

work, or cheerfully and intelligently recognised his
immense force. And accordingly we cannot help
perceiving that generations are arising who know not
Byron. This is not to say that he goes unread ; but
there is a vast gulf fixed between the author whom
we read with pleasure and even delight, and that
other to whom we turn at all moments for inspiration
and encouragement, and whose words and ideas spring
up incessantly and animatingly within us, unbidden,
whether we turn to him or no.

For no Englishman now does Byron hold this
highest place ; and this is not unnatural in any way,
if we remember in what a different shape the Revolu-
tion has now by change of circumstance and occasion
come to present itself to those who are most ardent
in the search after new paths. An estimate of Byron
would be in some sort a measure of the distance that
we have travelled within the last half century in our
appreciation of the conditions of social change. The
modern rebel is at least half-acquiescence. He has
developed a historic sense. The most hearty aversion
to the prolonged reign of some of the old gods does
not hinder him from seeing, that what are now frigid
and unlovely blocks were full of vitality and light in
days before the era of their petrifaction. There is
much less eagerness of praise or blame, and much less
faith in knife and cautery, less confidence that new
and right growth will naturally and necessarily follow
upon demolition.

The Revolution has never had that Ions hold on

BYRON. 207

the national imagination in England, either as an idol
or a bugbear, which is essential to keep the poet who
sings it in effective harmony with new generations of
readers. More than this, the Byronic conception was
as transitional and inadequate as the methods and
ideas of the practical movers, who were to a man left
stranded in every country in Europe, during the
period of his poetic activity. A transitional and un-
stable movement of society inevitably fails to supply
a propulsion powerful enough to make its poetic ex-
pression eternal. There is no better proof of the
enormous force of Byron's genius than that it was
able to produce so fine an expression of elements so
intrinsically unfavourable to high poetry as doubt,
denial, antagonism, and weariness. But this force
was no guarantee for perpetuity of influence. Bare
rebellion cannot endure, and no succession of genera-
tions can continue nourishing themselves on the poetry
of complaint, and the idealisation of revolt. If, how-
ever, it is impossible that Byron should be all to us
that he was to a former generation, and if we find no
direct guidance in his muse, this is no reason why
criticism should pass him over, nor why there may not
be something peculiarly valuable in the noble freedom
and genuine modernism of his poetic spirit, to an age
that is apparently only forsaking the clerical idyll of
one school, for the reactionary medievalism or pagan-
ism, intrinsically meaningless and issueless, of another.
More attention is now paid to the mysteries of
Byron's life than to the merits of his work, and

208 BYRON.

criticism and morality are equally injured by the
confusion between the worth of the verse he wrote,
and the virtue or wickedness of the life he lived.
The admirers of his poetry appear sensible of some
obligation to be the champions of his conduct, while
those who have diligently gathered together the details
of an accurate knowledge of the unseemliness of his
conduct, cannot bear to think that from this bramble
men have been able to gather figs. The result of the
confusion has been that grave men and women have
applied themselves to investigate and judge Byron's
private life, as if the exact manner of it, the more
or less of his outrages upon decorum, the degree
of the deadness of his sense of moral responsibility,
were matter of minute and profound interest to all
ages. As if all this had anything to do with criticism
proper. It is right that we should know the life and
manners of one whom we choose for a friend, or of
one who asks us to entrust him with the control of
public interests. In either of these two cases, we
need a guarantee for present and future. Art knows
nothing of guarantees. The work is before us, its
own warranty. What is it to us whether Turner had
coarse orgies Avith the trulls of Wapping 1 We can
judge his art without knowing or thinking of the
artist. And in the same way, what are the stories of
Byron's libertinism to us 1 They may have biograph-
ical interest, but of critical interest hardly the least.
If the name of the author of Manfred, Cain, Childe
Harold, were already lost, as it may be in remote

BYKON. 209

times, the work abides, and its mark on European
opinion. ' Je ne considere les gens apres leur mart,'
said Voltaire, 'que par leurs ouvrages ; tout le reste est
andanti pour moV

There is a sense in which biographical detail gives
light to criticism, but not the sense in which the
prurient moralist uses or seeks it. The life of the
poet may help to explain the growth and prominence
of a characteristic sentiment or peculiar idea. Know-
ledge of this or that fact in his life may uncover the
roots of something that strikes, or unravel something
that perplexes us. Considering the relations between
a man's character and circumstance, and what he
produces, we can from this point of view hardly
know too much as to the personality of a great
writer. Only let us recollect that this personality
manifests itself outwardly in two separate forms, in
conduct, and in literary production, and that each
of these manifestations is to be judged independently
of the other. If one of them is wholly censurable,
the other may still be the outcome of the better
mind ; and even from the purely biographical aspect,
it is a plain injustice to insist on identifying a char-
acter with its worse expression only.

Poetry, and not only poetry, but every other
channel of emotional expression and sesthetic culture,
confessedly moves with the general march of the
human mind, and art is only the transformation into
ideal and imaginative shapes of a predominant system

VOL. i. p

210 BYKON.

and philosophy of life. Minor verse-writers may
fairly he consigned, without disrespect, to the region
of the literature of taste ; and criticism of their work
takes the shape of a discussion of stray graces, of new
turns, of little variations of shade and colour, of
their conform it}' to the accepted rules that constitute
the technique of poetry. The loftier masters, though
their technical power and originality, their heauty of
form, strength of flight, music and variousness of
rhythm, are all full of interest and instruction, yet,
besides these precious gifts, come to us with the size
and quality of great historic forces, for they represent
the hope and energies, the dreams and the consum-
mation, of the human intelligence in its most enormous
movements. To appreciate one of these, we need to
survey it on every side. For these we need synthetic
criticism, which, after analysis has done its work, and
disclosed to us the peculiar qualities of form, concep-
tion, and treatment, shall collect the products of this
first process, construct for us the poet's mental figure
in its integrity and just coherence, and then finally,
as the sum of its work, shall trace the relations of
the poet's ideas, either direct or indirect, through the
central currents of thought, to the visible tendencies
of an existing age.

The greatest poets reflect beside all else the broad-
bosomed haven of a perfect and positive faith, in
which mankind has for some space found shelter,
unsuspicious of the new and distant wayfarings that
are ever in store. To this band of sacred bards few

BYRON. 211

are called, while perhaps not more than four high
names would fill the list of the chosen : Dante, the
poet of Catholicism ; Shakespeare, of Feudalism ;
Milton, of Protestantism ; Goethe, of that new faith
which is as yet without any universally recognised label,
but whose heaven is an ever-closer harmony between
the consciousness of man and all the natural forces
of the universe ; whose liturgy is culture, and whose
deity is a certain high composure of the human heart.
The far-shining pre-eminence of Shakespeare, apart
from the incomparable fertility and depth of his
natural gifts, arises secondarily from the larger extent
to which he transcended the special forming influences,
and refreshed his fancy and widened his range of
sympathy, by recourse to what was then the nearest
possible approach to a historic or political method.
To the poet, vision reveals a certain form of the truth,
which the rest of men laboriously discover and prove
by the tardier methods of meditation and science.
Shakespeare did not walk in imagination with the
great warriors, monarchs, churchmen, and rulers of
history, nor conceive their conduct, ideas, schemes,
and throw himself into their words and actions, with-
out strengthening that original taste which must have
first drawn him to historical subjects, and without
deepening both his feeling for the great progression
of human affairs, and his sympathy for those relative
moods of. surveying and dealing with them, which
are not more positive, scientific, and political, than
they may be made truly poetic.

212 BYRON.

Again, while in Dante the inspiring force waa
spiritual, and in Goethe it was intellectual, we may
say that both in Shakespeare and Milton it was
political and social. In other words, with these two,
the drama of the one and the epic of the other were
each of them connected with ideas of government and
the other external movements of men in society, and
with the play of the sentiments which spring from
them. We assuredly do not mean that in either of
them, least of all in Shakespeare, there is an absence
of the spiritual element. This would be at once to
thrust them down into a lower place ; for the spiritual
is of the very essence of poetry. But with the spiritual
there mixes in our Englishmen a most abundant
leaven of recognition of the impressions and impulses
of the outer forms of life, as well as of active sympathy
with the every-day debate of the world. They are
neither of them inferior to the highest in sense of the
wide and unutterable things of the spirit ; yet with
both of them, more than with other poets of the same
rank, the man with whose soul and circumstance they
have to deal is the ttoXitucov £ooov, no high abstraction
of the race, but the creature with concrete relations
and a full objective life. In Shakespeare the dramatic
form helps partly to make this more prominent, though
the poet's spirit shines forth thus, independently of
the mould which it imposes on itself. Of Milton we
may say, too, that, in spite of the supernatural
machinery of his greatest poem, it bears strongly
impressed on it the political mark, and that in those

BYRON. 213

minor pieces, where he is avowedly in the political
sphere, he still rises to the full height of his majestic
harmony and noblest dignity.

Byron was touched by the same fire. The con-
temporary and friend of the most truly spiritual of
all English poets, Shelley, he was himself among the
most essentially political. Or perhaps one will be
better understood, describing his quality as a quality
of poetical worldliness, in its enlarged and generous
sense of energetic interest in real transactions, and a
capacity of being moved and raised by them into those
lofty moods of emotion which in more spiritual natures
are only kindled by contemplation of the vast infini-
tudes that compass the human soul round about.
That Shelley was immeasurably superior to Byron in
all the rarer qualities of the specially poetic mind
appears to us so unmistakably assured a fact, that
difference of opinion upon it can only spring from a
more fundamental difference of opinion as to what
it is that constitutes this specially poetic quality.
If more than anything else it consists in the power
of transfiguring action, character, and thought, in
the serene radiance of the purest imaginative intelli-
gence, and the gift of expressing these transformed
products in the finest articulate vibrations of emotional
speech, then must we not confess that Byron has
composed no piece which from this point may com-
pare with Prometheus or the Cenci, any more than
Rubens may take his place with Raphael? We
feel that Shelley transports the spirit to the highest

214 BYRON.

bound and limit of the intelligible ; and that with
him thought passes through one superadded and more
rarefying process than the other poet is master of.
If it be true, as has been written, that ' Poetry is the
breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,' we may say
that Shelley teaches us to apprehend that further
something, the breath and finer spirit of poetry itself.
Contrasting, for example, Shelley's Ode to the West
Wind, with the famous and truly noble stanzas on
the eternal sea which close the fourth canto of Childe
Harold, who does not feel that there is in the first a
volatile and unseizable element that is quite distinct
from the imagination and force and high impressive-
ness, or from any indefinable product of all of these
united, which form the glory and power of the second 1
We may ask in the same way whether Manfred, where
the spiritual element is as predominant as it ever is in
Byron, is worth half a page of Prometheus.

To perceive and admit this is not to disparage
Byron's achievements. To be most deeply penetrated
with the differentiating quality of the poet is not,
after all, to contain the whole of that admixture of
varying and moderating elements which goes to the
composition of the broadest and most effective work.
Of these elements, Shelley, with all his rare gifts of
spiritual imagination and winged melodiousness of
verse, was markedly wanting in a keen and omni-
present feeling for the great course of human events.
All nature stirred him, except the consummating
crown of natural growth.

BYRON. 215

We do not mean anything so untrue as that Shelley
was wanting either in deep humanity or in active
benevolence, or that social injustice was a thing
indifferent to him. We do not forget the energetic
political propagandism of his youth in Ireland and
elsewhere. Many a furious stanza remains to show
how deeply and bitterly the spectacle of this injustice
burnt into his soid. But these pieces are accidents.
They do not belong to the immortal part of his work.
An American original, unconsciously bringing the
revolutionary mind to the climax of all utterances
possible to it, has said that ' men are degraded when
considered as the members of a political organisation.'1
Shelley's position was on a yet more remote pinnacle
than this. Of mankind he was barely conscious, in
his loftiest and divinest nights. His muse seeks the
vague translucent spaces where the care of man melts
away in vision of the eternal forces, of which man
may be but the fortuitous manifestation of an hour.

Byron, on the other hand, is never moved by the
strength of his passion or the depth of his contemplation
quite away from the round earth and the civil animal
who dwells upon it. Even his misanthropy is only
an inverted form of social solicitude. His practical
zeal for good and noble causes might teach us this.
He never grudged either money or time or personal
peril for the cause of Italian freedom, and his life was
the measure and the cost of his interest in the liberty
of Greece. Then again he was full not merely of wit,
1 Thoreau.

216 BYRON.

which is sometimes only an affair of the tongue, but
of humour also, which goes much deeper ; and it is of
the essence of the humoristic nature, that whether
sunny or saturnine, it binds the thoughts of him who
possesses it to the wide medley of expressly human
things. Byron did not misknow himself, nor mis-
apprehend the most marked turn of his own character,
when he wrote the lines —

I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the universe and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

It was this which made Byron a social force, a far
greater force than Shelley either has been or can be.
Men read in each page that he was one of like passions
with themselves ; that he had their own feet of clay,
if he had other members of brass and gold and fine
silver which they had none of ; and that vehement
sensibility, tenacious energy of imagination, a bounding
swell of poetic fancy, had not obliterated, but had
rather quickened, the sense of the highest kind of
man of the world, which did not decay but waxed
stronger in him with years. His openness to beautj7
and care for it were always inferior in keenness and
in hold upon him to his sense of human interest, and
the superiority in certain respects of Marino Faliero,
for example, where he handles a social theme in a
worthy spirit, over Manfred, where he seeks a some-
thing tumultuously beautiful, is due to that subordi-

BYRON. 217

nation in his mind of aesthetic to social intention,
which is one of the most strongly distinctive marks
of the truly modern spirit. The admirable wit both
of his letters, and of pieces like the Vision of Judgment
and Bon Juan, where wit reaches as high as any
English writer has ever carried it, shows in another
way the same vividness and reality of attraction
which every side of human affairs possessed for this
glowing and incessantly animated spirit.

In spite of a good many surface affectations, which
may have cheated the lighter heads, but which may
now be easily seen through, and counted off for as
much as they are worth, Byron possessed a bottom
of plain sincerity and rational sobriety which kept
him substantially straight, real, and human, and made
him the genuine exponent of that immense social
movement which we sum up as the Revolution. If
Keats's whole soul was absorbed by sensuous impres-
sions of the outer world, and his art was the splendid
and exquisite reproduction of these ; if Shelley on the
other hand distilled from the fine impressions of the
senses by process of inmost meditation some thrice
ethereal essence, 'the viewless spirit of a lovely
sound;' we may say of Byron that, even in the
moods when the mightiness and wonder of nature
had most effectually possessed themselves of his
imagination, his mind never moved for very long on
these remote heights, apart from the busy world of
men, but returned again like the fabled dove from
the desolate void of waters to the ark of mortal stress

218 BYRON

and human passion. Nature, in her most dazzling
aspects or stupendous parts, is but the background
and theatre of the tragedy of man.

We may find a secondary proof of this in the few-
ness of those fine descriptive strokes and subtle in-
direct touches of colour or sound which arise with
incessant spontaneity, where a mastering passion for
nature steeps the mind in vigilant, accurate, yet half-
unconscious, observation. It is amazing through how
long a catalogue of natural objects Byron sometimes
takes us, without affixing to one of them any but the
most conventional term, or a single epithet which
might show that in passing through his mind it had
yielded to him a beauty or a savour that had been
kept a secret from the common troop. Byron is cer-
tainly not wanting in commanding image, as when
Manfred likens the lines of foaming light flung along
from the Alpine cataract to ' the pale courser's tail,
the giant steed, to be bestrode by Death.' But imagin-
ative power of this kind is not the same thing as that
susceptibility to the minutest properties and unseen
qualities of natural objects which reveals itself in chance
epithet of telling felicity, or phrase that opens to us
hidden lights. Our generation is more likely to think
too much than too little of this ; for its favourite poet,
however narrow in subject and feeble in moral treat-
ment, is without any peer in the exquisitely original,
varied, and imaginative art of his landscape touches.

This treatment of nature was in exact harmony
with the method of revolutionary thought, which,

BYRON. 219

from the time of Rousseau downwards, had appealed
in its profound weariness of an existing social state
to the solitude and seeming freedom of mountain and
forest and ocean, as though the only cure for the
woes of civilisation lay in annihilating it. This was
an appeal less to nature than from man, just as we
have said that Byron's was, and hence it was dis-
tinct from the single-eyed appreciation and love of
nature for her own sake, for her heauty and terror
and unnumbered moods, which has made of her the
mistress and the consoler of many men in these times.
In the days of old faith while the catholic gods sat yet
firm upon their thrones, the loveliness of the universe
shone to blind eyes. Saint Bernard in the twelfth
century could ride for a whole day along the shore of
the Lake of Geneva, and yet when in the evening his
comrades spoke some word about the lake, he in-
quired : ' What lake 1 ' 1 It Avas not mere difference
of temperament that made the preacher of one age
pass by in this marvellous unconsciousness, and the
singer of another burst forth into that tender invo-
cation of ' clear placid Leman,' whose ' contrasted lake
with the wild world he dwelt in' moved him to the
very depths. To Saint Bernard the world was as
wild and confused as it was to Byron ; but then he
had gods many and saints many, and a holy church
in this world, and a kingdom of heaven awaiting
resplendent in the world to come. All this filled his
soul with a settled certitude, too absorbing to leave
1 Morison's Life of St. Bernard, p. 68 (2d edit.)

220 BYRON.

any space for other than religious emotion. The seven
centuries that flowed between the spiritual mind of
Europe when Saint Bernard was its spokesman, and
the spiritual mind of which Byron was the interpreter,
had gradually dissolved these certitudes, and the faint
lines of new belief and a more durable order were
still invisible. The assurance of science was not yet
rooted, nor had men as yet learned to turn back to
the history of their own kind, to the long chronicle
of its manifold experiences, for an adequate system
of life and an inspiring social faith. So they fled in
spirit or in flesh into unfamiliar scenes, and vanished
from society, because society was not sufficiently social.
The feeling was abnormal, and the method was
fundamentally artificial. A sentimentalism arose,
which is in art what the metaphysical method is in
philosophy. Yet a literature was born of it, whose
freshness, force, elevation, and, above all, a self-asser-
tion and peculiar aspiring freedom that have never
been surpassed, still exert an irresistible attraction,
even over minds that are furthest removed from the
moral storm and disorder, and the confused intel-
lectual convictions, of that extraordinary group.
Perhaps the fact that their active force is spent, and
that men find in them now only a charm and no
longer a gospel, explains the difference between the
admiration which some of us permit ourselves to feel
for them, and the impatient dislike which they stirred
in our fathers. Then they were a danger, because
they were a force, misleading amiable and highminded

BYRON. 221

people into blind paths. Now this is at an end, and,
apart from their historic interest, the permanent
elements of beauty draw us to them with a delight
that does not diminish, as we recede further and
further from the impotence of the aspirations which
thus married themselves to lofty and stirring words.
To say nothing of Rousseau, the father and founder
of the nature-worship, which is the nearest approach
to a positive side that the Revolution has ever pos-
sessed, how much fine colour and freshness of feeling
there is in Bene", what a sense of air and space in Paul
and Virginia, and what must they have been to a
generation that had just emerged from the close
parlours of Richardson, the best of the sentimentalists
of the prse-revolutionary type 1 May we not say, too,
in parenthesis, that the man is the votary, not of
wisdom, but of a bald and shapeless asceticism, who
is so excessively penetrated with the reality, the
duties, the claims, and the constant hazards of civilisa-
tion, as to find in himself no chord responsive to that
sombre pensiveness into which Obermann's unfathom-
able melancholy and impotence of will deepened, as
he meditated on the mean shadows which men are
content to chase for happiness, and on all the pigmy
progeny of giant effort 1 ' G'est peu de chose,' says
Obermann, 'de n'etre point comme le vulgaire des hommes;
mais Jest avoir fait un pas vers la sagesse, que de n'etre
plus comme le vulgaire des sages' This penetrating
remark hits the difference between De Senancourt
himself and most of the school. He is absolutely

222 BYEON.

free from the vulgarity of wisdom, and breathes the
air of higher peaks, taking us through mysterious and
fragrant pine-woods, where more than he may find
meditative repose amid the heat and stress of that
practical day, of which he and his school can never
bear the burden.

In that vulgaire des sages, of which De Senancourt
had none, Byron abounded. His work is in much
the glorification of revolutionary commonplace. Melo-
dramatic individualism reaches its climax in that long
series of Laras, Conrads, Manfreds, Harolds, who
present the fatal trilogy, in which crime is middle
term between debauch and satiety, that forms the
natural development of an anti-social doctrine in a
full-blooded temperament. It was this temperament
which, blending with his gifts of intellect, gave Byron
the amazing copiousness and force that makes him
the dazzling master of revolutionary emotion, because
it fills his work with such variety of figures, such free
change of incident, such diversity of passion, such a
constant movement and agitation. It was this never-
ceasing stir, coupled with a striking concreteness
and an unfailing directness, which rather than any
markedly correct or wide intellectual apprehension of
things, made him so much more than any one else
an effective interpreter of the moral tumult of the
epoch. If we look for psychological delicacy, for
subtle moral traits, for opening glimpses into unob-
served depths of character, behold, none of these
things are there. These were no gifts of his, any

BYRON. 223

more than the divine gift of music was his. There
are some writers whose words but half express the
indefinable thoughts that inspired them, and to whom
we have to surrender our whole minds with a peculiar
loyalty and fulness, independent of the letter and
printed phrase, if we would liquefy the frozen speech
and recover some portion of its imprisoned essence.
This is seldom a necessity with Byron. His words
tell us all that he means to say, and do not merely
hint nor suggest. The matter with which he deals is
gigantic, and he paints with violent colours and
sweeping pencil.

Yet he is free from that declamation with which
some of the French poets of the same age, and
representing a portion of the same movement, blow
out their cheeks. An angel of reasonableness seems
to watch over him, even when he comes most danger-
ously near to an extravagance. He is equally free
from a strained antithesis, which would have been
inconsistent, not only with the breadth of effect
required by Byron's art, but also with the peculiarly
direct and forcible quality of his genius. In the
preface to Marino Faliero, a composition that abounds
in noble passages, and rests on a fine and original
conception of character, he mentions his 'desire of
preserving a nearer approach to unity, than the
irregularity which is the reproach of the English
theatre.' And this sound view of the importance of
form, and of the barbarism to which our English

224 BYKON.

genius is prone, from Goody Blake and Harry Gill up
to the clownish savagery which occasionally defaces
even plays attributed to Shakespeare, is collateral
proof of the sanity and balance which marked the
foundations of his character, and which at no point of
his work ever entirely failed him. Byron's admiration
for Pope was no mere eccentricity.

We may value this self-control the more, by
remembering the nature of his subjects. We look
out upon a wild revolutionary welter, of vehement
activity without a purpose, boundless discontent
without a hope, futile interrogation of nature in
questions for which nature can have no answer,
unbridled passion, despairing satiety, impotence. It
is too easy, as the history of English opinion about
Byron's poetic merit abundantly proves, to underrate
the genius which mastered so tremendous a conflict,
and rendered that amazing scene with the flow and
energy and mingled tempest and forlorn calm which
belonged to the original reality. The essential futility
of the many moods which went to make up all this,
ought not to blind us to the enormous power that
was needed for the reproduction of a turbulent and
not quite aimless chaos of the soul, in which man
seemed to be divorced alike from his brother-men in
the present, and from all the long succession aud
endeavour of men in the past. It was no small feat
to rise to a height that should command so much,
and to exhibit with all the force of life a world that
had broken loose from its moorinars.

BYEON. 225

It is idle to vituperate this anarchy, either from
the point of view of a sour and precise Puritanism,
or the more elevated point of a rational and large
faith in progress. Wise men are like Burke, who
did not know how to draw an indictment against a
whole nation. They do not know how to think
nothing but ill of a whole generation, that lifted up
its voice in heartfelt complaint and wailing against
the conceptions, forms, and rulers, human and divine,
of a society that the inward faith had abandoned,
but which clung to every outward ordinance ; which
only remembered that man had property, and forgot
that he had a spirit. This is the complaint that
rings through Byron's verse. It was this complaint
that lay deep at the bottom of the Kevolution, and
took form in every possible kind of protest, from a
dishevelled neckcloth up to a profession of atheism.
Byron elaborated the common emotion, as the earliest
modern poets elaborated the common speech. He
gave it inflections, and distinguished its moods, and
threw over it an air of system and coherency, and a
certain goodly and far-reaching sonorousness. This
is the usual function of the spiritual leader, who
leaves in bulk no more in the minds of those whom
he attracts than he found, but he leaves it articulate
with many sounds, and vivid with the consciousness
of a multitude of defined impressions.

That the whole movement, in spite of its energy,
was crude, unscientific, virtually abortive, is most
true. That it was presided over by a false conception

VOL. I. q

226 BYRON.

of nature as a benign and purifying power, while she
is in truth a stern force to be tamed and mastered,
if society is to hold together, cannot be denied of the
revolutionary movement then, any more than it can
be denied of its sequels now. Nor need we overlook
its fundamental error of tracing half the misfortunes
and woes of the race to that social union, to which
we are really indebted for all the happiness we know,
including even this dignifying sensibility of the woes
of the race ; and the other half to a fictitious entity
styled destiny, placed among the nethermost gods,
which would be more rightly regarded as the infinitely
modifiable influence exercised by one generation of
ourselves upon those that follow.

Every one of these faults of thought is justly
chargeable to Byron. They were deeply inherent in
the Revolution. They coloured thoughts about
government, about laws, about morals. They effected
a transformation of religion, but, resting on no basis
of philosophical acceptance of history, the transforma-
tion was only temporary. They spread a fantastic
passion of which Byron was himself an example and
a victim, for extraordinary outbreaks of a peculiar
kind of material activity, that met the exigences of
an imperious will, while it had not the irksome-
ness of the self-control which would have exercised
the will to more permanent profit. They destroyed
faith in order, natural or social, actual or poten-
tial, and substituted for it an enthusiastic assertion
of the claims of the individual to make his pas-

BYRON. 227

sions, aspirations, and convictions, a final and decisive
law.

Such was the moral state which Byron had to
render and interpret. His relation to it was a relation
of exact sympathy. He felt the force of each of the
many currents that united in one destructive stream,
wildly overflowing the fixed banks, and then, when it
had overflowed, often, it must be confessed, stagnating
in lazy brackish pools, while new tributaries began to
flow in together from far other quarters. The list of
his poems is the catalogue of the elements of the
revolutionary spirit. For of what manner is this
spirit 1 Is it not a masterful and impatient yearning
after many good things, unsubdued and uninformed
either by a just knowledge of the time, and the means
which are needed to bring to men the fruits of their
hope, or by a fit appreciation of orderly and tranquil
activity for the common service, as the normal type
of the individual life? And this is precisely the
temper and the spirit of Byron. Nowhere else do we
see drawn in such traits that colossal figure, which
has haunted Europe these fourscore years and more,
with its new-born passion, its half-controlled will, its
constant cry for a multitude of unknown blessings
under the single name of Freedom, the one known
and unadulterated word of blessing. If only Truth,
which alone of words is essentially divine and sacro-
sanct, had been the chief talisman of the Bevolution,
the movement would have been very different from
that which we know. But to claim this or that in

228 BYKON.

the name of truth, would have been to borrow the
language which priests and presbyters, Dominic and
Calvin, had covered thick with hateful associations.
Freedom, after all, was the next best thing, for it is
an indispensable condition of the best of all ; but it
could not lead men until the spirit of truth, which
means science in the intellectual order, and justice in
the social order, had joined company with it.

So there was violent action in politics, and violent
and excessive stimulation in literature, the positive
effects of the force moved in each sphere being
deplorably small in proportion to the intense moral
energy which gave the impulse. In literature the
straining for mental liberty was the more futile of the
two, because it expressed the ardent and hopeless
longing of the individual for a life which we may
perhaps best call life unconditioned. And this uncon-
ditioned life, which the Byronic hero vainly seeks,
and not finding, he fills the world with stormy
complaint, is least of all likely to offer itself in any
approximate form to men penetrated with gross and
egotistical passions to their inmost core. The Byronic
hero went to clasp repose in a frenzy. All crimson
and aflame with passion, he groaned for evening
stillness. He insisted on being free, in the corroding
fetters of resentment and scorn for men. Conrad
sought balm for disappointment of spirit in vehement
activity of body. Manfred represents the confusion
common to the type, between thirst for the highest
knowledge and proud violence of unbridled will.

BYRON. 229

Harold is held in a middle way of poetic melancholy,
equally far from a speechless despair and from gay
and reckless licence, by contemplation of the loveliness
of external nature, and the great exploits and perish-
ing monuments of man in the past ; but he, equally
with the others, embodies the paradoxical hope that
angry isolation and fretful estrangement from man-
kind are equivalent to emancipation from their
pettiness, instead of being its very climax and
demonstration. As if freedom of soul could exist
without orderly relations of intelligence and partial
acceptance between a man and the sum of surrounding
circumstances. That universal protest which rings
through Byron's work with a plangent resonance,
very different from the whimperings of punier men,
is a proof that so far from being free, one's whole
being is invaded and laid waste. It is no ignoble
mood, and it was a most inevitable product of the
mental and social conditions of Western Europe at
the close of the eighteenth century. Everlasting
protest, impetuous energy of will, melancholy and
despondent reaction ; — this is the revolutionary course.
Cain and Conrad; then Manfred and Lara and
Harold.

In studying that portion of the European movement
which burst forth into flame in France between the
fall of the Bastille and those fatal days of Vend^miaire,
Fructidor, Floreal, Brumaire, in which the explosion
came convulsively to its end, we seem to see a micro-

230 BYRON.

cosm of the Byronic epos. The succession of moods
is identical. Overthrow, rage, intense material energy,
crime, profound melancholy, half-cynical dejection.
The Revolution was the battle of Will against the
social forces of a dozen centuries. Men thought that
they had only to will the freedom and happiness of a
world, and all nature and society would be plastic
before their daring, as clay in the hands of the potter.
They could only conceive of failure as another expres-
sion for inadequate will. Is not this one of the notes
of Byron's Ode on the Fall of Bonaparte ? ' L'audace,
I'audace, et toujours Faudace.' If Danton could have
read Byron, he would have felt as one in front of a
magician's glass. Every passion and fit, from the
bloody days of September down to the gloomy walks
by the banks of the Aube, and the prison-cry that
' it were better to be a poor fisherman than to meddle
with the governing of men,' would have found itself
there. It is true that in Byron we miss the firmness
of noble and generous hope. This makes him a more
veritable embodiment of the Revolution than such a
precursor as Rousseau, in whom were all the unclouded
anticipations of a dawn, that opened to an obscured
noon and a tempestuous night. Yet one knows not,
in truth, how much of that violence of will and rest-
less activity and resolute force was due less to con-
fidence, than to the urgent necessity which every one
of us has felt, at some season and under some influence,
of filling up spiritual vacuity by energetic material
activity. Was this the secret of the mysterious charm

BYRON. 231

that scenes of violent strife and bloodshed always had
for Byron's imagination, as it was perhaps the secret
of the black transformation of the social faith of '89
into the worship of the Conqueror of '99 1 Nowhere
does Byron's genius show so much of its own incom-
parable fire and energy, nor move with such sym-
pathetic firmness and amplitude of pinion, as in Lara,
the Corsair, Harold, and other poems, where 'Red
Battle stamps his foot,' and where

The giant on the mountain stands,
His blood-red tresses deep'ning in the sun,
With death-shot glowing in his fiery hands,
And eye that scorcheth all it glows upon.

Yet other and intrinsically nobler passages, where
this splendid imaginative energy of the sensations is
replaced by the calmer glow of social meditation, prove
that Byron was penetrated with the distinctively
modern scorn and aversion for the military spirit, and
the distinctively modern conviction of its being the
most deadly of anachronisms. Such indirect satisfac-
tion to the physical energies was to him, as their
direct satisfaction was to the disillusioned France of
'99, the relief demanded by a powerful nature for the
impotence of hope and vision.

However this may have been, it may be confessed
that Byron presents less of the flame of his revolu-
tionary prototypes, and too much of the ashes. He
came at the end of the experiment. But it is only a
question of proportion. The ashes belong as much
and as necessarily to the methods of the Revolution

232 BYRON.

in that phase, as do the hlaze, that first told men of
possihle light and warmth, and the fire, which yet
smoulders with abundant life underneath the gray
cinders. And we have to remember that Byron came
in the midst of a reaction ; a reaction of triumph for
the partisans of darkness and obstruction, who were
assured that the exploded fragments of the old order
would speedily grow together again, and a reaction of
despondency for those who had filled themselves with
illimitable and peremptory hopes. Silly Byronical
votaries, who only half understood their idol, and
loved him for a gloom that in their own case was
nothing but a graceful veil for selfishness and mental
indolence, saw and felt only the melancholy conclusion,
and had not travelled a yard in the burning path that
led to it. They hugged Conrad's haughty misery, but
they would have trembled at the thought of Conrad's
perilous expedition. They were proud despondent
Laras after their manner, 'lords of themselves, that
heritage of woe,' but the heritage would have been
still more unbearable, if it had involved Lara's bodily
danger.

This shallowness has no part in Byron himself.
His weariness was a genuine outcome of the influence
of the time upon a character consumed by passion.
His lot was cast among spent forces, and, while it is
no hyperbole to say that he was himself the most
enormous force of his time, he was only half con-
scious of this, if indeed he did not always inwardly
shrink from crediting his own power and strength, as

BYRON. 233

so many strong men habitually do, in spite of noisy
and perpetual self-assertion. Conceit and presump-
tion have not been any more fatal to the world, than
the waste which comes of great men failing in their
hearts to recognise how great they are. Many a man
whose affectations and assumptions are a proverb, has
lost the magnificent virtue of simplicity, for no other
reason than that he needed courage to take his own
measure, and so finally confirm to himself the reality
of his pretensions. With Byron, as with some of his
prototypes among the men of action in France and
elsewhere, theatrical ostentation, excessive self -con-
sciousness, extravagant claims, cannot hide from us
that their power was secretly drained by an ever-
present distrust of their own aims, their own methods,
even of the very results that they seem to have
achieved.

This diffidence was an inseparable consequence of
the vast predominance of exalted passion over
reflection, which is one of the revolutionary marks.
Byron was fundamentally and substantially, as has
been already said, one of the most rational of men.
Hence when the passionate fit grew cold, as it always
does in temperaments so mixed, he wanted for perfect
strength a justification in thought. There are men
whose being is so universally possessed by phantasies,
that they never feel this necessity of reconciling the
visions of excited emotion with the ideas of ordered
reason. Byron was more vigorously constituted, and
his susceptibility to the necessity of this reconciliation

234 BYEON.

combined with his inability to achieve it, to produce
that cynicism which the simple charity of vulgar
opinion attributes to the possession of him by unclean
devils. It was his refuge, as it sometimes is with
smaller men, from the disquieting confusion which
was caused by the disproportion between his visions
and aspirations, and his intellectual means for satis-
fying himself seriously as to their true relations and
substantive value. Only the man arrives at practical
strength who is convinced, whether rightly or wrongly,
that he knows all about his own ideas that needs to
be known. Byron never did thus know himself,
either morally or intellectually. The higher part of
him was consciously dragged down by the degrading
reminiscence of the brutishness of his youth and its
connections and associations ; they hung like miasma
over his spirit. He could not rise to that sublimest
height of moral fervour, when a man intrepidly chases
from his memory past evil done, suppresses the recol-
lection of old corruptions, declares that he no longer
belongs to them nor they to him, and is not frightened
by the past from a firm and lofty respect for present
dignity and worth. It is a good thing thus to over-
throw the tyranny of the memory, and to cast out
the body of our dead selves. That Byron never
attained this good, though he was not unlikely to
have done so if he had lived longer, does not prove
that he was too gross to feel its need, but it explains
a moral weakness which has left a strange and touch-
ing mark on some of his later works.

BYRON. 235

So in the intellectual order, he knew too much
in one sense, and in another too little. . The strong
man is not conscious of gaps and cataclysms in the
structure of his belief, or else he would in so far
instantly cease to be strong. One living, as Byron
emphatically did, in the truly modern atmosphere,
was bound by all the conditions of the atmosphere to
have mastered what we may call the natural history
of his own ideas and convictions ; to know something
of their position towards fact and outer circumstance
and possibility ; above all to have some trusty standard
for testing their value, and assuring himself that they
do really cover the field which he takes them to
cover. People with a faith and people living in frenzy
are equally under this law ; but they take the com-
pleteness and coherency of their doctrine for granted.
Byron was not the prey of habitual frenzy, and he
was without a faith. That is to say, he had no firm
basis for his conceptions, and he was aware that he
had none. The same unrest which drove men of that
epoch to Nature, haunted them to the end, because
they had no systematic conception of her working and
of human relations with her. In a word, there was
no science. Byron was a warm admirer of the genius
and art of Goethe, yet he never found out the central
secret of Goethe's greatness, his luminous and coherent
positivity. This is the crowning glory of the modern
spirit, and it Avas the lack of this which went so far
to neutralise Byron's hold of the other chief character-
istics of that spirit, its freedom and spaciousness, its

236 BYRON.

humaneness and wide sociality, its versatility and
many-sidedness and passionate feeling for the great
natural forces.

This positivity is the cardinal condition of strength
for times when theology lies in decay, and the abstrac-
tions which gradually replaced the older gods have in
their turn ceased to satisfy the intelligence and mould
the will. All competent persons agree that it is the
first condition of the attainment of scientific truth.
Nobody denies that men of action find in it the first
law of successful achievement in the material order.
Its varied but always superlative power in the region
of aesthetics is only an object of recent recognition,
though great work enough has been done in past ages
by men whose recognition was informal and inexpress.
It is plain that, in the different classes of aesthetic
manifestation, there will be differences in objective
shape and colour, corresponding to the varied limits
and conditions of the matter with which the special
art has to deal ; but the critic may expect to find in
all a profound unity of subjective impression, and
that, the impression of a self-sustaining order and a
self-sufficing harmony among all those faculties and
parts and energies of universal life, which come within
the idealising range of art. In other words, the char-
acteristically modern inspiration is the inspiration of
law. The regulated play of forces shows itself as fit
to stir those profound emotional impulses which wake
the artistic soul, as ever did the gracious or terrihle

BYRON. 237

gods of antique or middle times. There are glories in
Turner's idealisation of the energies of matter, which
are at least as nobly imaginative and elevated, in spite
of the conspicuous absence of the human element in
them, as the highest products of the artists who be-
lieved that their work was for the service and honour
of a deity.

It is as mistaken to suppose that this conviction of
the supremacy of a cold and self-sustained order in
the universe is fatal to emotional expansion, as it
would be to suppose it fatal to intellectual curiosity.
Experience has shown in the scientific sphere, that
the gradual withdrawal of natural operations from
the grasp of the imaginary volitions of imaginary
beings has not tamed, but greatly stimulated and
fertilised scientific curiosity as to the conditions of
these operations. Why should it be otherwise in the
aesthetic sphere 1 Why should all that part of our
mental composition which responds to the beautiful
and imaginative expression of real truths, be at once
inflamed and satisfied by the thought that our whole
lives, and all the movements of the universe, are the
objects of the inexplicable caprice of Makers who are
also Destroyers, and yet grow cold, apathetic, and
unproductive, in the shadow of the belief that we can
only know ourselves as part of the stupendous and
inexorable succession of phenomenal conditions, mov-
ing according to laws that may be formulated posi-
tively, but not interpreted morally, to new destinies
that are eternally unfathomable 1 Why should this

238 BYRON.

conception of a coherent order, free from the arbitrary
and presumptuous stamp of certain final causes, be
less favourable, either to the ethical or the aesthetic
side of human nature, than the older conception of
the regulation of the course of the great series by a
multitude of intrinsicalhy meaningless and purposeless
volitions? The alertness of our sensations for all
sources of outer beauty remains unimpaired. The
old and lovely attitude of devout service does not
pass away to leave vacancy, but is transformed into
a yet more devout obligation and service towards
creatures that have only their own fellowship and
mutual ministry to lean upon ; and if we miss some-
thing of the ancient solace of special and personal
protection, the loss is not unworthily made good by
the growth of an imperial sense of participation in
the common movement and equal destination of
eternal forces.

To have a mind penetrated with this spiritual per-
suasion, is to be in full possession of the highest
strength that man can attain. It springs from a
scientific and rounded interpretation of the facts of
life, and is in a harmony, which freshly found truths
only make more ample and elaborate, with all the
conclusions of the intellect in every order. The active
energies are not paralysed by the possibilities of en-
feebling doubt, nor the reason drawn down and stulti-
fied by apprehension lest its methods should discredit
a document, or its inferences clash with a dogma, or
its light flash unseasonably on a mystery. There is

BYRON. 239

none of the baleful distortion of hate, because evil
and wrong-doing and darkness are acknowledged to
be effects of causes, sums of conditions, terms in a
series; they are to be brought to their end, or
weakened and narrowed, by right action and endea-
vour, and this endeavour does not stagnate in anti-
pathy, but concentrates itself in transfixing a cause.
In no other condition of the spirit than this, in which
firm acquiescence mingles with valorous effort, can a
man be so sure of raising a calm gaze and an enduring
brow to the cruelty of circumstance. The last appal-
ling stroke of annihilation itself is measured with purest
fortitude by one, whose religious contemplation dwells
most habitually upon the sovereignty of obdurate
laws in the vast revolving circle of physical forces, on
the one hand, and, on the other, upon that moral
order which the vision and pity of good men for their
fellows, guiding the spontaneous energy of all men
in strife with circumstance, have raised into a structure
sublimer and more amazing than all the majesty of
outer nature.

In Byron's time the pretensions of the two possible
answers to the great and eternally open questions of
God, Immortality, and the like, were independent of
that powerful host of inferences and analogies which
the advance of physical discovery, and the establish-
ment of a historical order, have since then brought
into men's minds. The direct aggressions of old are
for the most part abandoned, because it is felt that
no fiercest polemical cannonading can drive away the

240 BYRON.

impalpable darkness of error, but only the slow and
silent presence of the dawning truth. Cain remains,
a stern and lofty statement of the case against that
theological tradition which so outrages, where it has
not already too deeply depraved, the conscience of
civilised man. Yet every one who is competent to
judge, must feel how infinitely more free the mind of
the poet would have been, if besides this just and
holy rage, most laudable in its kind, his intellectual
equipment had been ample enough and precise enough
to have taught him, that all the conceptions that races
of men have ever held, either about themselves or
their deities, have had a source in the permanently
useful instincts of human nature, are capable of
explanation, and of a historical justification ; that is
to say, of the kind of justification which is, in itself
and of its own force, the most instant destruction to
what has grown to be an anachronism.

Byron's curiously marked predilection for dramatic
composition, not merely for dramatic poems, as Man-
fred or Cain, but for genuine plays, as Marino Faliero,
Werner, the Two Foscari, was the only sign of his
approach to the really positive spirit. Dramatic art,
in its purest modern conception, is genuinely positive ;
that is, it is the presentation of action, character, and
motive in a self-sufficing and self-evolving order.
There are no final causes, and the first moving ele-
ments are taken for granted to begin with. The
dramatist creates, but it is the climax of his work to
appear to stand absolutely apart and unseen, while

BYRON. 241

the play unfolds itself to the spectator, just as the
greater drama of physical phenomena unfolds itself
to the scientific observer, or as the order of recorded
history extends in natural process under the eye of
the political philosopher. Partly, no doubt, the
attraction which dramatic form had for Byron is to
be explained by that revolutionary thirst for action,
of which we have already spoken ; but partly also it
may well have been due to Byron's rudimentary and
unsuspected affinity with the more constructive and
scientific side of the modern spirit.

His idea of Nature, of which something has been
already said, pointed in the same direction ; for, al-
though he made an abstraction and a goddess of her,
and was in so far out of the right modern way of
thinking about these outer forces, it is to be remem-
bered, that, while this dominant conception of Nature
as introduced by Rousseau and others into politics
was most mischievous and destructive, its place and
worth in poetry are very different ; because here in
the region of the imagination it had the effect, with-
out any pernicious practical consequences, of giving
shape and proportion to that great idea of ensemble
throughout the visible universe, which may be called
the beginning and fountain of right knowledge. The
conception of the relationship of the different parts
and members of the vast cosmos was not accessible to
Byron, as it is to a later generation, but his constant
appeal in season and out of season to all the life and
movement that surrounds man, implied and promoted

VOL. I. R

242 BYKON.

the widest extension of consciousness of the wholeness
and community of natural processes.

There was one very manifest evil consequence of
the hold which this idea in its cruder shape gained
over Byron and his admirers. The vastness of the
material universe, as they conceived and half adored
it, entirely overshadowed the principle of moral duty
and social obligation. The domestic sentiment, for
example, almost disappears in those works which
made Byron most popular, or else it only appears, to
be banished with reproach. This is quite in accordance
with the* revolutionary spirit, which was in one of its
most fundamental aspects a revolt on behalf of un-
conditioned individual rights, and against the family.
If we accept what seems to be the fatal law of progress,
that excess on one side is only moderated by a nearly
corresponding excess of an opposite kind, the Byronic
dissolution of domestic feeling was not entirely with-
out justification. There is probably no uglier growth
of time than that mean and poor form of domesticity,
which has always been too apt to fascinate the English
imagination, ever since the last great effort of the
Rebellion, and which rose to the climax of its popu-
larity when George in. won all hearts by living like
a farmer. Instead of the fierce light beating about a
throne, it played lambently upon a sty. And the
nation who admired, imitated. When the Regent
came, and with him that coarse profligacy which has
alternated with cloudy insipidity in the annals of the

BYKON. 243

line, the honest part of the world, out of antipathy to
the son, was driven even further into domestic senti-
mentality of a greasy kind, than it had gone from
affection for the sire.

Byron helped to clear the air of this. His fire, his
lofty spaciousness of outlook, his spirited interest in
great national causes, his romance, and the passion
both of his animosity and his sympathy, acted for a
while like an electric current, and every one within
his influence became ashamed to barter the large
heritage of manhood, with its many realms and
illimitable interests, for the sordid ease of the hearth
and the good word of the unworthy. He fills men
with thoughts that shake down the unlovely temple
of comfort. This was good, to force whoever was not
already too far sunk into the mire, high up to the
larger atmosphere, whence they could see how minute
an atom is man, how infinite and blind and pitiless
the might that encompasses his little life. Many
feeble spirits ran back homewards from the horrid
solitudes and abysses of Manfred, and the moral terrors
of Cain, and even the despair of Harold, and, burying
themselves in warm domestic places, were comforted
by the familiar restoratives and appliances. Firmer
souls were not only exhilarated, but intoxicated by
the potent and unaccustomed air. They went too
far. They made war on the family, and the idea of
it. Everything human was mischievously dwarfed,
and the difference between right and wrong, between
gratification of appetite and its control for virtue's

244 BTRON.

sake, between the acceptance and the evasion of clear
obligation, all became invisible or of no account in
the new light. That constancy and permanence, of
which the family is the type, and which is the first
condition alike of the stability and progress of society,
was obliterated from thought. As if the wonders
that have been wrought by this regulated constancy
of the feeling of man for man in transforming human
life were not far more transcendently exalting than
the contemplation of those glories of brute nature,
which are barbaric in comparison.

It would be unjust not to admit that there are
abundant passages in his poems of too manifest depth
and sincerity of feeling, for us to suppose that Byron
himself was dead to the beauty of domestic sentiment.
The united tenderness and dignity of Faliero's words
to Angiolina, before he goes to the meeting of the
conspirators, would, if there were nothing else, be
enough to show how rightly in his better moods the
poet appreciated the conditions of the family. Un-
fortunately the better moods were not fixed, and we
had Don Juan, where the wit and colour and power
served to make an anti-social and licentious sentiment
attractive to puny creatures, who were thankful to
have their lasciviousness so gaily adorned. As for
Great Britain, she deserved Don Juan. A nation,
whose disrespect for all ideas and aspirations that
cannot be supported by a text, nor circulated by a
religious tract society, was systematic, and where
consequently the understanding is least protected

BYEON. 245

against sensual sophisms, received no more than a
just chastisement in ' the literature of Satan.' Here
again, in the licence of this literature, we see the
finger of the Eevolution, and of that egoism which
makes the passions of the individual his own law.
Let us condemn and pass on, homily undelivered. If
Byron injured the domestic idea on this side, let us
not fail to observe how vastly he elevated it on others,
and how, above all, he pointed to the idea above and
beyond it, in whose light only can that be worthy,
the idea of a country and a public cause. A man
may be sure that the comfort of the hearth has usurped
too high a place, when he can read without response
the lines declaring that domestic ties must yield in
' those who are called to the highest destinies, which
purify corrupted commonwealths.'

We must forget all feelings save the one —
"We must resign all passions save our purpose —
We must behold no object save our country —
And only look on death as beautiful,
So that the sacrifice ascend to heaven
And draw down freedom on her evermore.

Calendaro. But if we fail

/. Bertuccio. They never fail who die

In a great cause : the block may soak their gore ;
Their heads may sodden in the sun ; their limbs
Be strung to city gates and castle walls —
But still their spirit walks abroad. Though years
Elapse, and others share as dark a doom,
Tiny but augment the deep and sweeping thoughts
Which overpower all others, and conduct
The world at last to freedom. What were we
If Brutus had not lived ? He died in giving

246 BYRON.

Rome liberty, but left a deathless lesson—
A name whicb is a virtue, and a soul
Which multiplies itself throughout all time,
When wicked men wax mighty, and a state
Turns servile.

And the man who wrote this was worthy to play
an even nobler part than the one he had thus nobly
described ; for it was not many years after, that Byron
left all and laid down his life for the emancipation of
a strange land, and 'Greece and Italy wept for his
death, as it had been that of the noblest of their
own sons.' Detractors have done their best to pare
away the merit of this act of self-renunciation by
attributing it to despair. That contemporaries of
their own humour had done their best to make his
life a load to him is true, yet to this talk of despair
we may reply in the poet's own words :

When we know
All that can come, and how to meet it, our
Resolves, if firm, may merit a more noble
Word than this, to give it utterance.

There was an estimate of the value and purpose of
a human life, which our Age of Comfort may fruitfully
ponder.

To fix upon violent will and incessant craving for
movement as the mark of a poet, whose contempor-
aries adored him for what they took to be the musing
sweetness of his melancholy, may seem a critical
perversity. There is, however, a momentous difference
between that melancholy, which is as the mere shadow
projected by a man's spiritual form, and that other

BYRON. 247

melancholy, which itself is the reality and substance
of a character ; between the soul to whom dejection
brings graceful relief after labour and effort, and the
soul which by irresistible habit and constitution dwells
ever in Golgotha. This deep and penetrating sub-
jective melancholy had no possession of Byron. His
character was essentially objective, stimulated by
outward circumstance, moving to outward harmonies,
seeking colour and image and purpose from without.
Hence there is inevitably a certain liveliness and
animation, even when he is in the depths. We feel
that we are watching clouds sweep majestically across
the sky, and, even when they are darkest, blue
interspaces are not far off. Contrast the moodiest
parts of Childe Harold or of Cain with Novalis's
Night Hymns. Byron's gloom is a mere elegance in
comparison. The one pipes to us with a graceful
despondency on the edge of the gulf, while the other
carries us actually down into the black profound,
with no rebellious cry, nor shriek of woe, but
sombrely awaiting the deliverance of death, with soul
absorbed and consumed by weariness. Let the reader
mark the note of mourning struck in the opening
stanzas, for instance, of Novalis's Longing after Death,
their simplicity, homeliness, transparent sincerity,
and then turn to any of the familiar passages where
Byron meditates on the good things which the
end brings to men. How artificial he seems, and
unseasonably ornate, and how conscious of his public.
In the first, we sit sadly on the ground in some

248 BYRON.

veritable Place of a Skull; in the second, we assist
at tragical distress after the manner of the Italian
opera. We should be disposed to call the first a
peculiarly German quality, until we remember Pascal.
With Novalis, or with Pascal, as with all those whom
character, or the outer fates, or the two together,
have drawn to dwell in the valley of the shadow,
gloom and despondency are the very stuff of their
thoughts. Material energy could have done nothing
for them. Their nerves and sinews were too nearly
cut asunder. To know the quality of Byron's melan-
choly, and to recognise how little it was of the essence
of his character, we have only to consider how far
removed he was from this condition. In other words,
in spite of morbid manifestations of one sort and
another, he always preserved a salutary and vivid
sympathy for action, and a marked capacity for it.

It was the same impetuous and indomitable spirit
of effort which moved Byron to his last heroic exploit,
that made the poetry inspired by it so powerful in
Europe, from the deadly days of the Holy Alliance
onwards. Cynical and misanthropical as he has been
called, as though that were his sum and substance,
he yet never ceased to glorify human freedom, in
tones that stirred the hearts of men and quickened
their hope and upheld their daring, as with the voice
of some heavenly trumpet. You may, if you choose,
find the splendour of the stanzas in the Fourth Canto
on the Bourbon restoration, on Cromwell, and Wash-

BYRON. 249

ington, a theatrical splendour. But for all that, they
touched the noblest parts of men. They are alive
with an exalted and magnanimous generosity, the
one high virtue which can never fail to touch a
multitude. Subtlety may miss them, graces may
miss them, and reason may fly over their heads, but
the words of a generous humanity on the lips of poet
or chief have never failed to kindle divine music in
their breasts. The critic may censure, and culture
may wave a disdainful hand. As has been said, all
such words 'are open to criticism, and they are all
above it.' The magic still works. A mysterious and
potent word from the gods has gone abroad over the
face of the earth.

This larger influence was not impaired by Byron's
ethical poverty. The latter was an inevitable conse-
quence of his defective discipline. The triteness of
his moral climax is occasionally startling. When
Sardanapalus, for instance, sees Zarina torn from him,
and is stricken with profound anguish at the pain
with which he has filled her life, he winds up with
such a platitude as this :

To what gulfs
A single deviation from the track
Of human duties leaves even those who claim
The homage of mankind as their born due !

The baldest writer of hymns might work up passion
enough for a consummation like this. Once more,
Byron was insufficiently furnished with positive intel-
lectual ideas, and for want of these his most exalted

250 BYRON.

words were constantly left sterile of definite and
pointed outcome.

Byron's passionate feeling for mankind included
the long succession of generations, that stretch hack
into the past and lie far on in the misty distances of
the future. No poet has had a more sublime sense
of the infinite melancholy of history ; indeed, we
hardly feel how great a poet Byron was, until we
have read him at Venice, at Florence, and above all
in that overpowering scene where the 'lone mother
of dead empires' broods like a mysterious haunting
spirit among the columns and arches and wrecked
fabrics of Rome. No one has expressed with such
amplitude the sentiment that in a hundred sacred
spots of the earth has

Fill'd up
As 'twere, anew, the gaps of centuries ;
Leaving that heautiful which still was so,
And making that which was not ; till the place
Became religious, and the heart ran o'er
With silent worship of the great of old —
The dead, but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.

Only he stands aright, who from his little point of
present possession ever meditates on the far-reaching
lines, which pass through his point from one intermin-
able star-light distance to another. Neither the stoic
pagan, nor the disciple of the creed which has some
of the peculiar weakness of stoicism and not all its
peculiar strength, could find Manfred's latest word
untrue to himself :

BYKON. 251

The mind, which is immortal, makes itself

Requital for its good or evil thoughts —

Is its own origin of ill and end,

And its own place and time : its innate sense,

"When stripped of this mortality, derives

No colour from the fleeting things without :

But is absorbed in sufferance of joy,

Born from the knowledge of its own desert.

It is only when a man subordinates this absorp
tion in individual sufferance and joy to the thought
that his life is a trust for humanity, that he is sure of
making it anything other than ' rain fallen on the
sand.' In the last great episode of his own career
Byron was as lofty as the noblest side of his creed.
The historic feeling for the unseen benefactors of old
time was matched by vehemence of sympathy with
the struggles for liberation of his own day. And for
this, history will not forget him. Though he may
have no place in our own Minster, he assuredly
belongs to the band of far -shining men, of whom
Pericles declared the whole world to be the tomb.

MACAULAY.

' After glancing my eye over the design and order
of a new book,' says Gibbon, ' I suspended the perusal
till I had finished the task of self-examination, till I
had revolved in a solitary walk all that I knew or
believed or had thought on the subject of the whole
work or of some particular chapter; I was then quali-
fied to discern how much the author added to my
original stock ; and if I was sometimes satisfied by the
agreement, I was sometimes warned by the opposition
of our ideas.' It is also told of Strafford that before
reading any book for the first time, he would call
for a sheet of paper, and then proceed to write down
upon it some sketch of the ideas that he already had
upon the subject of the book, and of the questions
that he expected to find answered. No one who has
been at the pains to try the experiment, will doubt
the usefulness of this practice : it gives to our acquisi-
tions from books clearness and reality, a right place
and an independent shape. At this moment we are
all looking for the biography of an illustrious man of
letters, written by a near kinsman, who is himself
naturally endowed with keen literary interests, and

254 MACAULAY.

who has invigorated his academic cultivation by
practical engagement in considerable affairs of public
business. Before taking up Mr. Trevelyan's two
volumes, it is perhaps worth while, on Strafford's
plan, to ask ourselves shortly what kind of signifi-
cance or value belongs to Lord Macaulay's achieve-
ments, and to what place he has a claim among the
forces of English literature. It is seventeen years
since he died, and those of us who never knew him
nor ever saw him, may now think about his work
with that perfect detachment which is impossible in
the case of actual contemporaries.1

That Macaulay comes in the very front rank in
the mind of the ordinary bookbuyer of our day is
quite certain. It is an amusement with some people
to put an imaginary case of banishment to a desert

1 Since the following piece was written, Mr. Trevelyan's
biography of Lord Macaulay has appeared, and has enjoyed the
great popularity to which its careful execution, its brightness
of style, its good taste, its sound judgment, so richly entitle
it. If Mr. Trevelyan's course in politics were not so useful as
it is, one might be tempted to regret that he had not chosen
literature for the main field of his career. The portrait which
he draws of Lord Macaulay is so irresistibly attractive in many
ways, that a critic may be glad to have delivered his soul before
his judgment was subject to a dangerous bias, by the picture of
Macaulay's personal character — its domestic amiability, its
benevolence to unlucky followers of letters, its manliness, its
high public spirit and generous patriotism. On reading my
criticism over again, I am well pleased to. find that not an
epithet needs to be altered, — so independent is opinion as to
this strong man's work, of our esteem for his loyal and
upright character.

MACAULAY. 255

island, with the privilege of choosing the works of
one author, and no more than one, to furnish literary
companionship and refreshment for the rest of a life-
time. Whom would one select for this momentous
post? Clearly the author must be voluminous, for
days on desert islands are many and long ; he must
be varied in his moods, his topics, and his interests ;
he must have a great deal to say, and must have a
power of saying it that shall arrest a depressed and
dolorous spirit. Englishmen, of course, would with
mechanical unanimity call for Shakespeare ; Germans
could hardly hesitate about Goethe ; and a sensible
Frenchman would pack up the ninety volumes of
Voltaire. It would be at least as interesting to know
the object of a second choice, supposing the tyrant in
his clemency to give us two authors. In the case of
Englishmen there is some evidence as to a popular
preference. A recent traveller in Australia informs
us that the three books which he found on every
squatter's shelf, and which at last he knew before
he crossed the threshold that he should be sure to
find, were Shakespeare, the Bible, and Macaulay's
Essays. This is only an illustration of a feeling about
Macaulay that has been almost universal among the
English-speaking peoples.

We may safely say that no man obtains and keeps
for a great many years such a position as this, unless
he is possessed of some very extraordinary qualities,
or else of common qualities in a very uncommon and
extraordinary degree. The world, sajrs Goethe, is

256 MACAU LAY.

more willing to endure the Incongruous than to be
patient under the Insignificant. Even those who set
least value on what Macaulay does for his readers,
may still feel bound to distinguish the elements that
have given him his vast popularity. The inquiry is
not a piece of merely literary criticism, for it is
impossible that the work of so imposing a writer
should have passed through the hands of every man
and woman of his time who has even the humblest
pretensions to cultivation, without leaving a very
decided mark on their habits both of thought and
expression. As a plain matter of observation, it is
impossible to take up a newspaper or a review, for
instance, without perceiving Macaulay's influence both
in the style and the temper of modern journalism, and
journalism in its turn acts upon the style and temper
of its enormous uncounted public. The man who
now succeeds in catching the ear of the writers of
leading articles, is in the position that used to be held
by the head of some great theological school, whence
disciples swarmed forth to reproduce in ten thousand
pulpits the arguments, the opinions, the images, the
tricks, the postures, and the mannerisms of a single
master.

Two men of very different kinds have thoroughly
impressed the journalists of our time, Macaulay and
Mr. Mill. Mr. Carlyle we do not add to them ; he
is, as the Germans call Jean Paul, der Einzige. And
he is a poet, while the other two are in their degrees
serious and argumentative writers, dealing in different

MACAULAY. 257

ways with the great topics that constitute the matter
and business of daily discussion. They are both of
them practical enough to interest men handling real
•'affairs, and yet they are general or theoretical enough
to supply such men with the large and ready common-
places which are so useful to a profession that has to
produce literary graces and philosophical decorations
at an hour's notice. It might perhaps be said of these
two distinguished men that our public writers owe
most of their virtues to the one, and most of their
vices to the other. If Mill taught some of them to
reason, Macaulay tempted more of them to declaim :
if Mill set an example of patience, tolerance, and fair
examination of hostile opinions, Macaulay did much
to encourage oracular arrogance, and a rather too
thrasonical complacency ; if Mill sowed ideas of the
great economic, political, and moral bearings of the
! forces of society, Macaulay trained a taste for super-
ficial particularities, trivial circumstantialities of local
colour, and all the paraphernalia of the pseudo-
picturesque.

Of course nothing so obviously untrue is meant as
that this is an account of Macaulay 's own quality.
What is empty pretension in the leading article, was
often a warranted self-assertion in Macaulay ; what
in it is little more than testiness, is in him often a
generous indignation. What became and still remain
in those who have made him their model, substantive
and organic vices, the foundation of literary character
and intellectual temper, were in him the incidental
VOL. i. S

258 MACAULAY.

defects of a vigorous genius. And we have to take a
man of his power and vigour with all his drawbacks,
for the one are wrapped up in the other. Charles
Fox used to apply to Burke a passage that Quintilian
wrote about Ovid. ' Si animi sui affectibus temperare
quam indulgere maluisset,' quoted Fox, ' quid vir iste
praestare non potuerit ! ' But this is really not at all
certain either of Ovid, or Burke, or any one else. It
suits moralists to tell us that excellence lies in thehappy
mean and nice balance of our faculties and impulses,
and perhaps in so far as our own contentment and an
easy passage through life are involved, what they tell
us is true. But for making a mark in the world, for
rising to supremacy in art or thought or affairs —
whatever those aims may be worth — a man possibly
does better to indulge, rather than to chide or grudge,
his genius, and to pay the penalties for his weakness,
rather than run any risk of mutilating those strong
faculties of which they happen to be an inseparable
accident. Versatility is not a universal gift among
the able men of the world ; not many of them have
so many gifts of the spirit, as to be free to choose by
what pass they will climb 'the steep where Fame's
proud temple shines afar.' If Macaulay had applied
himself to the cultivation of a balanced judgment, of
tempered phrases, and of relative propositions, he
would probably have sunk into an impotent tameness.
A great pugilist has sometimes been converted from
the error of his ways, and been led zealously to cherish
gospel graces, but the hero's discourses have seldom

MACATJLAY. 259

had the notes of unction and edification. Macaulay,
* divested of all the exorbitances of his spirit and his
style, would have been a Samson shorn of the locks
of his strength.

Although, however, a writer of marked quality
may do well to let his genius develop its spontaneous
forces without too assiduous or vigilant repression,
trusting to other writers of equal strength in other
directions, and to the general fitness of things and
operation of time, to redress the balance, still it is
the task of criticism in counting up the contributions
of one of these strong men to examine the mischiefs
no less than the benefits incident to their work.
There is no puny carping nor cavilling in the process.
It is because such men are strong that they are able
to do harm ; they may injure the taste and judgment
of a whole generation, just because they are never
mediocre. That is implied in strength. Macaulay
is not to be measured now merely as if he were the
author of a new book. His influence has been a
distinct literary force, and in an age of reading, this
is to be a distinct force in deciding the temper, the
process, the breadth, of men's opinions, no less than
the manner of expressing them. It is no new obser-
vation that the influence of an author becomes in
time something apart from his books : a certain
generalised or abstract personality impresses itself on
our minds, long after we have forgotten the details
of his opinions, the arguments by which he enforced
them, and even, what are usually the last to escape

260 MAC AULA Y

us, the images by which he illustrated them. Phrases
i and sentences are a mask : but we detect the features
of the man behind the mask. This personality of a
favourite author is a real and powerful agency.
Unconsciously we are infected with his humours ; we
apply his methods; we find ourselves copying the
rhythm and measure of his periods ; we wonder how
he would have acted, or thought, or spoken in our
circumstances. Usually a strong writer leaves a
special mark in some particular region of mental
activity : the final product of him is to fix some per-
sistent religious mood, or some decisive intellectual
bias, or else some trick of the tongue. Now Macaulay
has contributed no philosophic ideas to the speculative
stock, nor has he developed any one great historic or
social truth. His work is always full of a high spirit
of manliness, probity, and honour ; but he is not of that
small band to whom we may apply Mackintosh's thrice
and four times enviable panegyric on the eloquence
of Dugald Stewart, that its peculiar glory consisted
<v in having 'breathed the love of virtue into whole
' generations of pupils.' He has painted many striking
pictures, and imparted a certain reality to our con-
ception of many great scenes of the past. He did
< good service in banishing once for all those sentimental
\ Jacobite leanings and prejudices which had been kept
l alive by the sophistry of the most popular of historians,
and the imagination of the most popular of romance
writers. But where he set his stamp has been upon
style; style in its widest sense, not merely on the

MAC AULA Y. 261

grammar and mechanism of writing, but on what De
Quincey described as its organology ; style, that is to
say, in its relation to ideas and feelings, its commerce
with thought, and its reaction on what one may call
the temper or conscience of the intellect.

Let no man suppose that it matters little whether
the most universally popular of the serious authors of
a generation — and Macaulay was nothing less than
this — affects style coupd or style soutenu. The critic of
stylo is not the dancing-master, declaiming on the
deep ineffable things that lie in a minuet. He is not
the virtuoso of supines and gerundives. The morality
of style goes deeper 'than dull fools suppose.' When
Comte took pains to prevent any sentence from ex-
ceeding two lines of his manuscript or five of print ;
to restrict every paragraph to seven sentences ; to
exclude every hiatus between two sentences, or even
between two paragraphs ; and never to reproduce any
word, except the auxiliary monosyllables, in two con-
secutive sentences ; he justified his literary solicitude
by insisting on the wholesomeness alike to heart and
intelligence of submission to artificial institutions. He
felt, after he had once mastered the habit of the new
yoke, that it became the source of continual and un-
foreseeable improvements even in thought, and he
perceived that the reason why verse is a higher kind
of literary perfection than prose, is that verse imposes
a greater number of rigorous forms. We may add
that verse itself is perfected, in the hands of men of
poetic genius, in proportion to the severity of this

262 MACAULAY.

mechanical regulation. Where Pope or Racine had
one rule of metre, Victor Hugo has twenty, and he
observes them as rigorously as an algebraist or an
astronomer observes the rules of calculation or de-
monstration. One, then, who touches the style of a
generation acquires no trifling authority over its
thought and temper, as well as over the length of its
sentences.

The first and most obvious secret of Macaulay's
place on popular bookshelves is that he has a true
genius for narration, and narration will always in the
eyes, not only of our squatters in the Australian bush,
but of the many all over the world, stand first among
literary gifts. The common run of plain men, as has
been noticed since the beginning of the world, are as
eager as children for a story, and like children they
will embrace the man who will tell them a story, with
abundance of details and plenty of colour, and a
realistic assurance that it is no mere make-believe.
Macaulay never stops to brood over an incident or a
character, with an inner eye intent on penetrating to
the lowest depth of motive and cause, to the furthest
complexity of impulse, calculation, and subtle incen-
tive. The spirit of analysis is not in him, and the
divine spirit of meditation is not in him. His whole
mind runs in action and movement; it busies itself
with eager interest in all objective particulars. He
is seized by the external and the superficial, and revels
in every detail that appeals to the five senses. ' The

MACAULAY. 263

brilliant Macaulay, 'said Emerson, with slight exaggera-
tion, ' who expresses the tone of the English governing
classes of the day, explicitly teaches that good means
good to eat, good to wear, material commodity.' So
ready a faculty of exultation in the exceeding great
glories of taste and touch, of loud sound and glittering
spectacle, is a gift of the utmost service to the narrator
who craves immense audiences. Let it be said that
if Macaulay exults in the details that go to our five
senses, his sensuousness is always clean, manly, and
fit for honest daylight and the summer sun. There
is none of that curious odour of autumnal decay that
clings to the passion of a more modern school for
colour and flavour and the enumerated treasures of
subtle indulgence.

Mere picturesqueness, however, is a minor qualifica-
tion compared with another quality which everybody
assumes himself to have, but which is in reality
extremely uncommon ; the quality, I mean, of telling
a tale directly and in straightforward order. In
speaking of Hallam, Macaulay complained that Gibbon
had brought into fashion an unpleasant trick of telling
a story by implication and allusion. This provoking
obliquity has certainly increased rather than declined
since Hallam's day. Mr. Froude, it is true, whatever
may be his shortcomings on the side of sound moral
and political judgment, has admirable gifts in the
way of straightforward narration, and Mr. Freeman,
when he does not press too hotly after emphasis, and
abstains from overloading his account with super-

264 MACAULAY.

abundance of detail, is usually excellent in the way
of direct description. Still, it is not merely because
these two writers are alive and Macaulay is not, that
most people would say of him that he is unequalled
in our time in his mastery of the art of letting us
know in an express and unmistakable way exactly
what it was that happened ; though it is quite true
that in many portions of his too elaborated History
of William the Third he describes a large number of
events about which, I think, no sensible man can in
in the least care either how they happened, or whether
indeed they happened at all or not.

Another reason why people have sought Macaulay
is, that he has in one way or another something to
tell them about many of the most striking personages
and interesting events in the history of mankind,
And he does really tell them something. If any one
will be at the trouble to count up the number of
those names that belong to the world and time, about
which Macaulay has found not merely something, but
something definite and pointed to say, he will be
astonished to see how large a portion of the wide
historic realm is traversed in that ample flight of
reference, allusion, and illustration, and what unspar-
ing copiousness of knowledge gives substance, meaning,
and attraction to that resplendent blaze of rhetoric.

Macaulay came upon the world of letters just as
the middle classes were expanding into enormous
prosperity, were vastly increasing in numbers, and
were becoming more alive than they had ever been

MACAULAY. 265

before to literary interests. His Essays are as good
as a library : they make an incomparable manual and
vade-mecum for a busy uneducated man, who has
curiosity and enlightenment enough to wish to know
a little about the great lives and great thoughts, the
shining words and many-coloured complexities of
action, that have marked the journey of man through
the ages. Macaulay had an intimate acquaintance
both with the imaginative literature and the history
of Greece and Rome, with the literature and the
history of modern Italy, of France, and of England.
Whatever his special subject, he contrives to pour
into it with singular dexterity a stream of rich,
graphic, and telling illustrations from all these widely
diversified sources. Figures from history, ancient
and modern, sacred and secular; characters from
plays and novels from Plautus down to Walter Scott
and Jane Austen ; images and similes from poets of
every age and every nation, ' pastoral, pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical ; ' shrewd thrusts
from satirists, wise saws from sages, pleasantries
caustic or pathetic from humorists ; all these throng
Macaulay's pages with the bustle and variety and
animation of some glittering masque and cosmoramic
revel of great books and heroical men. Hence,
though Macaulay was in mental constitution one of
the very least Shakesperean writers that ever lived,
yet he has the Shakesperean quality of taking his
reader through an immense gallery of interesting
characters and striking situations. No writer can

266 MACAULAY.

now expect to attain the widest popularity as a man
of letters unless he gives to the world multa as well
as multum. Sainte-Beuve, the most eminent man of
letters in France in our generation, wrote no less than
twenty-seven volumes of his incomparable Causeries.
Mr. Carlyle, the most eminent man of letters in
England in our generation, has taught us that silence
is golden in thirty volumes. Macaulay was not so
exuberantly copious as these two illustrious writers,
but he had the art of being as various without being
so voluminous.

There has been a great deal of deliberate and
systematic imitation of Macaulay's style, often by
clever men who might well have trusted to their own
resources. Its most conspicuous vices are very easy
to imitate, but it is impossible for any one who is less
familiar with literature than Macaulay was, to repro-
duce his style effectively, for the reason that it is
before all else the style of great literary knowledge.
Nor is that all. Macaulay's knowledge was not only
very wide; it was both thoroughly accurate and
instantly ready. For this stream of apt illustrations
he was indebted to his extraordinary memory, and
his rapid eye for contrasts and analogies. They come
to the end of his pen as he writes; they are not
laboriously hunted out in indexes, and then added by
way of afterthought and extraneous interpolation.
Hence quotations and references that in a writer even
of equal knowledge, but with his wits less promptly
about him, would seem mechanical and awkward, find

MACAULAY. 267

their place in a page of Macaulay as if by a delightful
process of complete assimilation and spontaneous
fusion.

We may be sure that no author could have
achieved Macaulay's boundless popularity among his
contemporaries, unless his work had abounded in
what is substantially Commonplace. Addison puts
fine writing in sentiments that are natural without
being obvious, and this is a true account of the ' law '
of the exquisite literature of the Queen Anne men.
We may perhaps add to Addison's definition, that the
great secret of the best kind of popularity is always
the noble or imaginative handling of Commonplace.
Shakespeare may at first seem an example to the
contrary ; and indeed is it not a standing marvel that
the greatest writer of a nation that is distinguished
among all nations for the pharisaism, puritanism, and
unimaginative narrowness of its judgments on conduct
and type of character, should be paramount over all
writers for the breadth, maturity, fulness, subtlety,
and infinite variousness of his conception of human
life and nature ? One possible answer to the perplexity
is that the puritanism does not go below the surface
in us, and that Englishmen are not really limited in
their view by the too strait formulas that are supposed
to contain their explanations of the moral universe.
On this theory the popular appreciation of Shakespeare
is the irrepressible response of the hearty inner man
to a voice, in which he recognises the full note of

268 MACAULAY.

human nature, and those wonders of the world which
are not dreamt of in his professed philosophy. A
more obvious answer than this is that Shakespeare's
popularity with the many is not due to those finer
glimpses that are the very essence of all poetic delight
to the few, but to his thousand other magnificent
attractions, and above all, after his skill as a pure
dramatist and master of scenic interest and situation,
to the lofty or pathetic setting with which he vivifies,
not the subtleties or refinements, but the commonest
and most elementary traits of the commonest and
most elementary human moods. The few with minds
touched by nature or right cultivation to the finer
issues, admire the supreme genius which takes some
poor Italian tale, with its coarse plot and gross
personages, and shooting it through with threads of
variegated meditation, produces a masterpiece of pene-
trative reflection and high pensive suggestion as to
the deepest things and most secret parts of the life of
men. But to the general these finer threads are
indiscernible. What touches them in the Shakes-
perean poetry, and most rightly touches them and us
all, are topics eternally old, yet of eternal freshness,
the perennial truisms of the grave and the bride-
chamber, of shifting fortune, of the surprises of
destiny, and the emptiness of the answered vow.
This is the region in which the poet wins his widest
if not his hardest triumphs, the region of the noble
Commonplace.

A writer dealing with such matters as principally

MACAULAY. 269

occupied Macaulay, has not the privilege of resort
to these great poetic inspirations. Yet history, too,
has its generous commonplaces, its plausibilities of
emotion, and no one has ever delighted more than
Macaulay did, to appeal to the fine truisms that

\ cluster round love of freedom and love of native
Uand. The high rhetorical topics of liberty and
patriotism are his readiest instruments for kindling
a glowing reflection of these magnanimous passions
in the breasts of his readers. That Englishman is
hardly to be envied who can read without a glow
such passages as that in the History, about Turenne

I being startled by the shout of stern exultation with
which his English allies advanced to the combat, and

^ expressing the delight of a true soldier when he
learned that it was ever the fashion of Cromwell's
pikemen to rejoice greatly when they beheld the
enemy ; while even the banished cavaliers felt an
emotion of national pride when they saw a brigade of
their countrymen, outnumbered by foes and abandoned
by friends, drive before it in headlong rout the finest
infantry of Spain, and force a passage into a counter-
scarp which had just been pronounced impregnable
by the ablest of the marshals of France. Such prose
as this is not less thrilling to a man who loves his
country, than the spirited verse of the Lays of
Ancient Rome. And the commonplaces of patriotism
and freedom would never have been so powerful in
Macaulay 's hands, if they had not been inspired by a
\ sincere and hearty faith in them in the soul of the

270 MACAULAY.

writer. His unanalytical turn of mind kept, him free
of any temptation to think of love of country as a
prejudice, or a passion for freedom as an illusion.
The cosmopolitan or international idea which such
teachers as Cobden have tried to impress on our
stubborn islanders, would have found in Macaulay
not lukewarm or sceptical adherence, but point-blank
opposition and denial. He believed as stoutly in the
supremacy of Great Britain in the history of the
good causes of Europe, as M. Thiers believes in the
supremacy of France, or Mazzini believed in that of
Italy. The thought of the prodigious industry, the
inventiveness, the stout enterprise, the free govern-
ment, the wise and equal laws, the noble literature,
of this fortunate island and its majestic empire beyond
the seas, and the discretion, valour, and tenacity by
which all these great material and still greater intan-
gible possessions had been first won, and then kept,
against every hostile comer whether domestic or
foreign, sent through Macaulay a thrill, like that
which the thought of Paris and its heroisms moves
in the great poet of France, or sight of the dear city
of the Violet Crown moved in an Athenian of old.
Thus habitually, with all sincerity of heart, to offer
to one of the greater popular prepossessions the
incense due to any other idol of superstition, sacred
and of indisputable authority, and to let this adora-
tion be seen shining in every page, is one of the keys
that every man must find, who would make a quick
and sure way into the temple of contemporary fame.

MACAULAY. 271

It is one of the first things to be said about
Macaulay, that he was in exact accord with the
common average sentiment of his day on every sub-
ject on which he spoke. His superiority was not of
that highest kind which leads a man to march in
thought on the outside margin of the crowd, watching
them, sympathising with them, hoping for them, but
apart. Macaulay was one of the middle-class crowd
in his heart, and only rose above it by splendid
attainments and extraordinary gifts of expression.
He had none of that ambition which inflames some
, hardy men, to make new beliefs and new passions
enter the minds of their neighbours ; his ascendency
is due to literary pomp, not to fecundity of spirit.
No one has ever surpassed him in the art of combining
resolute and ostentatious common sense of a slightly
coarse sort in choosing his point of view, with so
considerable an appearance of dignity and elevation
in setting it forth and impressing it upon others.
The elaborateness of his style is very likely to mis-
lead people into imagining for him a corresponding
elaborateness of thought and sentiment. On the
contrary, Macaulay's mind was really very simple,
strait, and with as few notes in its register, to borrow
a phrase from the language of vocal compass, as there
are few notes, though they are very loud, in the
register of his written prose. When we look more
closely into it, what at first wore the air of dignity
and elevation, in truth rather disagreeably resembles
the narrow assurance of a man who knows that he

272 MACAULAY.

has with him the great battalions of public opinion
We are always quite sure that if Macaulay had been
an Athenian citizen towards the ninety-fifth Olympiad,
he would have taken sides with Anytus and Meletus
in the impeachment of Socrates. A popular author
must, in a thorough-going way, take the accepted
- maxims for granted. He must suppress any whimsical
fancy for applying the Socratic elenchus, or any other
engine of criticism, scepticism, or verification, to those
sentiments or current precepts of morals, which may
in truth be very equivocal and may be much neglected
in practice, but which the public opinion of his time
requires to be treated in theory and in literature as
if they had been cherished and held sacred 'semper,
ubique, et ab omnibus.

This is just what Macaulay does, and it is com-
monly supposed to be no heavy fault in him or any
other writer for the common public. Man cannot
live by analysis alone, nor nourish himself on the
secret delights of irony. And if Macaulay had only
reflected the more generous of the prejudices of man-
kind, it would have been well enough. Burke, for
instance, was a writer who revered the prejudices of
a modern society as deeply as Macaulay did ; he
believed society to be founded on prejudices and held
compact by them. Yet what size there is in Burke,
what fine perspective, what momentum, what edifica-
tion ! It may be pleaded that there is the literature
of edification, and there is the literature of knowledge,
and that the qualities proper to the one cannot law-

MACAULAY. 273

fully be expected from the other, and would only be
very much out of place if they should happen to be
found there. But there are two answers to this.
First, Macaulay in the course of his varied writings
discusses all sorts of ethical and other matters, and is
not simply a chronicler of party and intrigue, of
dynasties and campaigns. Second> and more than
this, even if he had never travelled beyond the com-
position of historical record, he could still have sown
his pages, as does every truly great writer, no matter
what his subject may be, with those significant images
or far-reaching suggestions, which suddenly light up
a whole range of distant thoughts and sympathies
within us ; which in an instant affect the sensibilities
of men Avith a something new and unforeseen ; and
which awaken, if only for a passing moment, the
faculty and response of the diviner mind. Tacitus
does all this, and Burke does it, and that is why men
who care nothing for Boman despots or for Jacobin
despots, will still perpetually turn to those writers
almost as if they were on the level of great poets or
very excellent spiritual teachers.

One secret is that they, and all such men as they
were, had that of which Macaulay can hardly have
had the rudimentary germ, the faculty of deep abstract
meditation and surrender to the fruitful ' leisures of
the spirit.' We can picture Macaulay talking, or
\making a speech in the House of Commons, or buried
\n a book, or scouring his library for references, or
covering his blue foolscap with dashing periods, or

VOL. I. T

274 MACAULAY.

\ accentuating his sentences and barbing his phrases:
\ but can anybody think of him as meditating, as
\ modestly pondering and wondering, as possessed for
so much as ten minutes by that spirit of inwardness,
which has never been wholly wanting in any of those
kings and princes of literature, with whom it is good
for men to sit in counsel1? He seeks Truth, not as
she should be sought, devoutly, tentatively, and with
the air of one touching the hem of a sacred garment,
but clutching her by the hair of the head and dragging
her after him in a kind of boisterous triumph, a prisoner
of war and not a goddess.

All this finds itself reflected, as the inner temper
of a man always is reflected, in his style of written
prose. The merits of Macaulay's prose are obvious
enough. It naturally reproduces the good qualities
of his understanding, its strength, manliness, and
directness. That exultation in material goods and
glories of which we have already spoken, makes his
pages rich in colour, and gives them the effect of a
sumptuous gala-suit. Certainly the brocade is too
brand-new, and has none of the delicate charm that
comes to such finery when it is a little faded.
Again, nobody can have any excuse for not knowing
exactly what it is that Macaulay means. We may
assuredly say of his prose what Boileau says of his
own poetry — ' Et mon vers, bien ou mal, dit toujours
quelquc chose.' This is a prodigious merit, when we
reflect with what fatal alacrity human language lends
itself in the hands of so many performers upon the

MACADLAY. 275

pliant instrument, to all sorts of obscurity, ambiguity,
disguise, and pretentious mystification. Scaliger is
supposed to have remarked of the Basques and their
desperate tongue : ' Tis said the Basques understand
one another; for my part, I will never believe it.'
The same pungent doubt might apply to loftier
members of the hierarchy of speech than that forlorn
dialect, but never to English as handled by Macaulay.
He never wrote an obscure sentence in his life, and
this may seem a small merit, until we remember of
how few writers we could say the same.

Macaulay is of those who think prose as susceptible
of polished and definite form as verse, and he was,
we should suppose, of those also who hold the type
and mould of all written language to be spoken
language. There are more reasons for demurring to
the soundness of the latter doctrine, than can con-
veniently be made to fill a digression here. For one
thing, spoken language necessarily implies one or
more listeners, whereas written language may often
have to express meditative moods and trains of inward
reflection that move through the mind without trace
of external reference, and that would lose their special
traits by the introduction of any suspicion that they
were to be overheard. Again, even granting that all
composition must be supposed to be meant, by the
fact of its existence, to be addressed to a body of
readers, it still remains to be shown that indirect
address to the inner ear should follow the same
method and rhythm as address directly through im-

276 MA.CAULAY.

pressions on the outer organ. The attitude of the
recipient mind is different, and there is the symholism
of a new medium between it and the speaker. The
writer, being cut off from all those effects which are
producible by the physical intonations of the voice,
has to find substitutes for them by other means, by
subtler cadences, by a more varied modulation, by
firmer notes, by more complex circuits, than suffice
for the utmost perfection of spoken language, which
has all the potent and manifold aids of personality.
In writing, whether it be prose or verse, you are free
to produce effects whose peculiarity one can only
define vaguely, by saying that the senses have one
part less in them than in any other of the forms and
effects of art, and the imaginary voice one part more.
But the question need not be laboured here, because
there can be no dispute as to the quality of Macaulay's
prose. Its measures are emphatically the measures of
spoken deliverance. Those who have made the ex-
periment, pronounce him to be one of the authors
whose works are most admirably fitted for reading
aloud. His firmness and directness of statement, his
spiritedness, his art of selecting salient and highly
coloured detail, and all his other merits as a narrator,
keep the listener's attention, and make him the easiest
of writers to follow.

Although, however, clearness, directness, and posi-
tiveness are master qualities and the indispensable
foundations of all good style, yet does the matter
plainly by no means end with them. And it is even

MACAULAY. 277

possible to have these virtues so unhappily propor-
tioned and inauspiciously mixed with other turns and
casts of mind, as to end in work with little grace or
harmony or fine tracery about it, but only overweening
purpose and vehement will. And it is overweening-
ness and self-confident will that are the chief notes of
Macaulay's style. It has no benignity. Energy is
doubtless a delightful quality, but then Macaulay's
energy is perhaps energy without momentum, and he
impresses us more by a strong volubility than by
volume. It is the energy of interests and intuitions,
which though they are profoundly sincere if ever they
were sincere in any man, are yet in the relations
which they comprehend, essentially superficial.

Still, trenchancy whether in speaker or writer is a
most effective tone for a large public. It gives them
confidence in their man, and prevents tediousness —
except to those who reflect how delicate is the poise
of truth, and what steeps and pits encompass the
dealer in unqualified propositions. To such persons,
a writer who is trenchant in every sentence of every
page, who never lapses for a line into the contingent,
who marches through the intricacies of things in a
blaze of certainty, is not only a writer to be distrusted,
but the owner of a doubtful and displeasing style. It
is a great test of style to watch how an author disposes
of the qualifications, limitations, and exceptions that
clog the wings of his main proposition. The grave
and conscientious men of the seventeenth century
insisted on packing them all honestly along with the

278 MACAULAY.

main proposition itself, within the hounds of a single
period. Burke arranges them in tolerably close order
in the paragraph. Dr. Newmann, that winning writer,
disperses them lightly over his page. Of Macaulay
it is hardly unfair to say that he despatches all qualifi-
cations into outer space before he begins to write, or
if he magnanimously admits one or two here and
there, it is only to bring them the more imposingly
to the same murderous end.

We have spoken of Macaulay's interests and intui-
tions wearing a certain air of superficiality ; there is
a feeling of the same kind about his attempts to be
genial. It is not truly festive. There is no abandon-
ment in it. It has no deep root in moral humour, and
is merely a literary form, resembling nothing so much
as the hard geniality of some clever college tutor of
stiff manners, entertaining undergraduates at an
official breakfast-party. This is not because his tone
is bookish ; on the contrary, his tone and kvel are
distinctly those of the man of the world. But one
always seems to find that neither a wide range of
cultivation, nor familiar access to the best Whig
circles, had quite removed the stiffness and self-con-
scious precision of the Clapham Sect. We would
give much for a little more flexibility, and would
welcome ever so slight a consciousness of infirmity.
As has been said, the only people whom men cannot
pardon are the perfect. Macaulay is like the military
king who never suffered himself to be seen, even by
the attendants in his bed-chamber, until he had had

MACAULAY. 279

time to put on his uniform and jack-boots. His
seventy of eye is very wholesome ; it makes his writ-
ing firm, and firmness is certainly one of the first
qualities that good writing must have. But there is
such a thing as soft and considerate precision, as well
as hard and scolding precision. Those most interest-
ing English critics of the generation slightly anterior
to Macaulay, — Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Leigh
Hunt, — were fully his equals in precision, and yet
they knew how to be clear, acute, and definite, with-
out that edginess and inelasticity which is so con-
spicuous in Macaulay's criticisms, alike in their matter
and their form.

To borrow the figure of an old writer, Macaulay's
prose is not like a flowing vestment to his thought,
but like a suit of armour. It is often splendid and
glittering, and the movement of the opening pages
of his History is superb in its dignity. But that
movement is exceptional. As a rule there is the
hardness, if there is also often the sheen, of highly-
wrought metal. Or, to change our figure, his pages
are composed as a handsome edifice is reared, not as
a fine statue or a frieze ' with bossy sculptures graven '
grows up in the imaginative mind of the statuary.
There is no liquid continuity, such as indicates a
writer possessed by his subject and not merely pos-
sessing it. The periods are marshalled in due order
of procession, bright and high-stepping ; they never
escape under an impulse of emotion into the full cur-
rent of a brimming stream. What is curious is that

280 MACAULAY.

though Macaulay seems ever to be brandishing a
two-edged gleaming sword, and though he steeps us
in an atmosphere of belligerency, yet we are never
conscious of inward agitation in him, and perhaps
this alone would debar him from a place among the
greatest writers. For thejr, under that reserve, sup-
pression, or management, which is an indispensable
condition of the finest rhetorical art, even when aim-
ing at the most passionate effects, still succeed in
conveying to their readers a thrilling sense of the
strong fires that are glowing underneath. Now when
Macaulay advances with his hectoring sentences and
his rough pistolling ways, we feel all the time that
his pulse is as steady as that of the most practised
duellist who ever ate fire. He is too cool to be be-
trayed into a single phrase of happy improvisation.
His pictures glare, but are seldom warm. Those
strokes of minute circumstantiality which he loved
so dearly, show that even in moments when his ima-
gination might seem to be moving both spontaneously
and ardently, it was really only a literary instrument,
a fashioning tool and not a melting flame. Let us
take a single example. He is describing the trial of
"Warren Hastings. 'Every step in the proceedings,'
he says, ' carried the mind either backward through
many troubled centuries to the days when the
foundations of our constitution were laid ; or far away
over boundless seas and deserts, to dusky nations
living under strange stars, worshipping strange gods,
and writing strange characters from right to left.

MAC AULA Y. 281

The odd triviality of the last detail, its umvorthiness
of the sentiment of the passage, leaves the reader
checked , what sets out as a fine stroke of imagination
dwindles down to a sort of literary conceit. And
this puerile twist, by the way, is all the poorer, when
it is considered that the native writing is really from
left to right, and only takes the other direction in a
foreign, that is to say, a Persian alphabet. And so
in other places, even where the writer is most de-
servedly admired for gorgeous picturesque effect, we
feel that it is only the literary picturesque, a kind of
infinitely glorified newspaper-reporting. Compare,
for instance, the most imaginative piece to be found
in any part of Macaulay's writings with that sudden
and lovely apostrophe in Carlyle, after describing the
bloody horrors that followed the fall of the Bastille in
1789: — '0 evening sun of July, how, at this hour,
thy beams fall slant on reapers amid peaceful woody
fields ; on old women spinning in cottages ; on ships
far out in the silent main ; on balls at the Orangerie
at Versailles, where high-rouged dames of the Palace
are even now dancing with double-jacketed Hussar
officers; — and also on this roaring Hell-porch of a
Hotel de Ville ! ' Who does not feel in this the breath
of poetic inspiration, and how different it is from
the mere composite of the rhetorician's imagination,
assiduously working to order 1

This remark is no disparagement of Macaulay's
genius, but a classification of it. We are interrogating
our own impressions, and asking ourselves among

282 MACAULAY.

what kind of writers he ought to be placed. Rhetoric
is a good and worthy art, and rhetorical authors are
often more useful, more instructive, more really
respectable than poetical authors. But it is to be said
that Macaulay as a rhetorician will hardly be placed
in the first rank, by those who have studied both him
and the great masters. Once more, no amount of
embellishment or emphasis or brilliant figure suffices
to produce this intense effect of agitation rigorously
restrained ; nor can any beauty of decoration be in
the least a substitute for that touching and penetrative
music, which is made in prose by the repressed trouble
of grave and high souls. There is a certain music, we
do not deny, in Macaulay, but it is the music of a
man everlastingly playing for us rapid solos on a
silver trumpet, never the swelling diapasons of the
organ, and never the deep ecstasies of the four magic
strings. That so sensible a man as Macaulay should
keep clear of the modern abomination of dithyrambic
prose, that rank and sprawling weed of speech, was
natural enough ; but then the effects which we miss
in him, and which, considering how strong the literary
faculty in him really was, we are almost astonished to
miss, are not produced by dithyramb but by repression.
Of course the answer has been already given; Macaulay,
powerful and vigorous as he was, had no agitation,
no wonder, no tumult of spirit to repress. The
world was spread out clear before him ; he read it as
plainly and as certainly as he read his books ; life was
all an affair of direct catee;oricals.

MACAULAY. 283

This was at least one secret of those hard modula-
tions and shallow cadences. How poor is the rhythm
of Macaulay's prose we only realise by going with his
periods fresh in our ear to some true master of
harmony. It is not worth while to epiote passages
from an author who is in everybody's library, and
Macaulay is always so much like himself that almost
any one page will serve for an illustration exactly as
well as any other. Let any one turn to his character
of Somers, for whom he had so much admiration, and
then turn to Clarendon's character of Falkland ; — ' a
person of such prodigious parts of learning and
knowledge, of that inimitable sweetness and delight
in conversation, of so flowing and obliging a humanity
and goodness to mankind, and of that primitive
simplicity and integrity of life, that if there were no
other brand upon this odious and accursed civil war
than that single loss, it must be most infamous and
execrable to all posterity.' Now Clarendon is not a
great writer, not even a good writer, for he is prolix
and involved, yet we see that even Clarendon, when
he comes to a matter in which his heart is engaged,
becomes sweet and harmonious in his rhythm. If we
turn to a prose-writer of the very first place, we are
instantly conscious of a still greater difference. How
flashy and shallow Macaulay's periods seem, as we
listen to the fine ground -base that rolls in the
melody of the following passage of Burke's, and
it is taken from one of the least ornate of all his
pieces : —

284 MACAULAY.

You will not, we trust, believe that, born in a civil-
ised country, formed to gentle manners, trained in a
merciful religion, and living in enlightened and polished
times, where even foreign hostility is softened from its
original sternness, we could have thought of letting loose
upon you, our late beloved brethren, these fierce tribes of
savages and cannibals, in whom the traces of human nature
are effaced by ignorance and barbarity. We rather wished
to have joined with you in bringing gradually that un-
happy part of mankind into civility, order, piety, and
virtuous discipline, than to have confirmed their evil
habits and increased their natural ferocity by fleshing
them in the slaughter of you, whom our wiser and better
ancestors had sent into the wilderness with the express
view of introducing, along with our holy religion, its
humane and charitable manners. We do not hold that
all things are lawful in war. We should think every
barbarity, in fire, in wasting, in murders, in tortures, and
other cruelties, too horrible and too full of turpitude for
Christian mouths to utter or ears to hear, if done at our
instigation, by those who we know will make war thus if
they make it at all, to be, to all intents and purposes, as if
done by ourselves. We clear ourselves to you our brethren,
to the present age, and to future generations, to our king and
our country, and to Europe, which as a spectator, beholds this
tragic scene, of every part or share in adding this last and
worst of evils to the inevitable mischiefs of a civil war.

We do not call you rebels and traitors. We do not
call for the vengeance of the crown against you. We do
not know how to qualify millions of our countrymen, con-
tending with one heart for an admission to privileges
which we have ever thought our own happiness and
honour, by odious and unworthy names. On the contrary,
we highly revere the principles on which you act, though
we lament some of their effects. Armed as you are, we
embrace you, as our friends and as our brethren by the
best and dearest ties of relation.

MACAULAY. 285

It may be said that there is a patent injustice in
comparing the prose of a historian criticising or
describing great events at second hand, with the
prose of a statesman taking active part in great
events, fired by the passion of a present conflict, and
stimulated by the vivid interest of undetermined
issues. If this be a well-grounded plea, and it may
be so, then of course it excludes a contrast not only
with Burke, but also with Bolingbroke, whose fine
manners and polished gaiety give us a keen sense of
the grievous garishness of Macaulay. If we may
not institute a comparison between Macaulay and
great actors on the stage of affairs, at least there can
be no objection to the introduction of Southey as a
standard of comparison. Southey was a man of
letters pure and simple, and it is worth remarking
that Macaulay himself admitted that he found so
great a charm in Southey's style, as nearly always
to read it with pleasure, even when Southey was
talking nonsense. Now, take any page of the Life of
Nelson or the Life of Wesley; consider how easy,
smooth, natural, and winning is the diction and the
rise and fall of the sentence, and yet how varied the
rhythm and how nervous the phrases ; and then turn
to a page of Macaulay, and wince under its stamping
emphasis, its over-coloured tropes, its exaggerated
expressions, its unlovely staccato. Southey's History
of the Peninsular War is now dead, but if any of my
readers has a copy on his highest shelves, I would
venture to ask him to take down the third volume,

286 MACAULAY.

and read the concluding pages, of which Coleridge
used to say that they were the finest specimen of
historic eulogy he had ever read in English, adding
with forgivable hyperbole, that they were more to
the Duke's fame and glory than a campaign. ' Fore-
sight and enterprise with our commander went hand
in hand ; he never advanced but so as to be sure of
his retreat ; and never retreated but in such an
attitude as to impose upon a superior enemy,' and so
on through the sum of Wellington's achievements.
' There was something more precious than these,
more to be desired than the high and enduring fame
which he had secured by his military achievements,
the satisfaction of thinking to what end those achieve-
ments had been directed ; that they were for the
deliverance of two most injured and grievously
oppressed nations ; for the safety, honour, and welfare
of his own country ; and for the general interests of
Europe and of the civilised world. His campaigns
were sanctified by the cause; they were sullied by
no cruelties, no crimes ; the chariot-wheels of his
triumphs have been followed by no curses ; his laurels
are entwined with the amaranths of righteousness,
and upon his death-bed he might remember his
victories among his good works.'

What is worse than want of depth and fineness of
intonation in a period, is all gross excess of colour,
because excess of colour is connected with graver
faults in the region of the intellectual conscience.
Macaulay is a constant sinner in this respect. The

MACAULAY. 287

wine of truth is in his cup a brandied draught, a
hundred degrees above proof, and he too often
replenishes the lamp of knowledge with naphtha
instead of fine oil. It is not that he has a spontan-
eous passion for exuberant decoration, which he
would have shared with more than one of the greatest
names in literature. On the contrary, we feel that
the exaggerated words and dashing sentences are the
fruit of deliberate travail, and the petulance or the
irony of his speech is mostly due to a driving predi-
lection for strong effects. His memory, his directness,
his aptitude for forcing things into firm outline, and
giving them a sharply defined edge, — these and other
singular talents of his all lent themselves to this
intrepid and indefatigable pursuit of effect. And the
most disagreeable feature is that Macaulay Avar so
often content with an effect of an essentially vulgar
kind, offensive to taste, discordant to the fastidious
ear, and worst of all, at enmity with the whole spirit
of truth. By vulgar we certainly do not mean homely,
which marks a wholly different quality. No writer
can be more homely than Mr. Carlyle, alike in his
choice of particulars to dwell upon, and in the terms
or images in which he describes or illustrates them,
but there is also no writer further removed from
vulgarity. Nor do we mean that Macaulay too
copiously enriches the tongue with infusion from any
Doric dialect. For such raciness he had little taste.
What we find in him is that qualitj7 which the French
call brutal. The description, for instance, in the

288 MACAUIAY.

essay on Hallam, of the licence of the Restoration,
seems to us a coarse and vulgar picture, whose painter
took the most garish colours he could find on his
palette, and then laid them on in untempered crudity.
And who is not sensible of the vulgarity and coarse-
ness of the account of Boswell 1 ' If he had not
been a great fool he would not have been a great
writer .... he was a dunce, a parasite, and a
coxcomb,' and so forth, in which the shallowness
of the analysis of Bos well's character matches the
puerile rudeness of the terms. Here again, is a sen-
tence about Montesquieu. ' The English at that
time,' Macaulay says of the middle of the eighteenth
century. ' considered a Frenchman who talked about
constitutional checks and fundamental laws as a pro-
digy not less astonishing than the learned pig or
musical infant.' And he then goes on to describe the
author of one of the most important books that ever
were written, as 'specious but shallow, studious of
effect, indifferent to truth — the lively President,' and
so forth, stirring in any reader who happens to know
Montesquieu's influence, a singular amazement. We
are not concerned with the judgment upon Montes-
quieu, nor with the truth as to contemporary English
opinion about him, but a writer who devises an anti-
thesis to such a man as Montesquieu in learned pigs
and musical infants, deliberately condescends not
merely to triviality or levity, but to flat vulgarity of
thought, to something of mean and ignoble associa-
tion. Though one of the most common, this is not

MACAULAY. 289

Macaulay's only siu in the same unfortunate direc-
tion. He too frequently resorts to vulgar gaudiness.
For example, there is in one place a certain descrip-
tion of an alleged practice of Addison's. Swift had
said of Esther Johnson that ' whether from easiness
in general, or from her indifference to persons, or from
her despair of mending them, or from the same prac-
tice which she most liked in Mr. Addison, I cannot
determine ; but when she saw any of the company
very warm in a wrong opinion, she was more inclined
to confirm them in it than to oppose them. It pre-
vented noise, she said, and saved time.'1 Let us
behold what a picture Macaulay draws on the strength
of this passage. ' If his first attempts to set a pre-
suming dunce right were ill-received,' Macaulay says
of Addison, ' he changed his tone, " assented with
civil leer," and lured the flattered coxcomb deeper
and deeper into absurdity.' To compare this trans-
formation of the simplicity of the original into the
grotesque heat and overcharged violence of the copy,
is to see the homely maiden of a country village trans-
formed into the painted flaunter of the city.

One more instance. We should be sorry to violate
any sentiment of to o-c/avov about a man of Macaulay's
genius, but what is a decorous term for a description
of the doctrine of Lucretius's great poem, thrown in
parenthetically, as the ' silliest and meanest system
of natural and moral philosophy ! ' Even disagreeable
artifices of composition may be forgiven, when they

1 Forster's Swift, i. 265.
VOL. I. U

290 MACAULAY.

serve to vivify truth, to quicken or to widen the
moral judgment, but Macaulay's hardy and habitual
recourse to strenuous superlatives is fundamentally
unscientific and untrue. There is no more instructive
example in our literature than he, of the saying that
the adjective is the enemy of the substantive.

In 1837 Jeffrey saw a letter written by Macaulay
to a common friend, and stating the reasons for pre-
ferring a literary to a political life. Jeffrey thought
that his illustrious ally was wrong in the conclusion
to which he came. 'As to the tranquillity of an
author's life,' he said, ' I have no sort of faith in it.
And as to fame, if an author's is now and then more
lasting, it is generally longer withheld, and except iu
a few rare cases it is of a less pervading or elevating
description. A great poet or a great original writer
is above all other glory. But who would give much
for such a glory as Gibbon's 1 Besides, I believe it
is in the inward glow and pride of consciously in-
fluencing the destinies of mankind, much more than
in the sense of personal reputation, that the delight
of either poet or statesman chiefly consists.' And
Gibbon had at least the advantage of throwing him-
self into a religious controversy that is destined to
endure for centuries. He, moreover, was specifically
a historian, while Macaulay has been prized less as a
historian proper than as a masler of literary art.
Now a man of letters, in an age of battle and transi-
tion like our own, fades into an ever-deepening dis-

MACAULAY. 291

tance, unless he has while he writes that touching
and impressive quality, — the presentiment of the eve ;
a feeling of the difficulties and interests that will
engage and distract mankind on the morrow. Nor
can it be enough for enduring fame in any age merely
to throw a golden halo round the secularity of the
hour, or to make glorious the narrowest limitations
of the passing day. If we think what a changed
sense is already given to criticism, what a different
conception now presides over history, how many pro-
blems on which Macaulay was silent are now the
familiar puzzles of even superficial readers, we cannot
help feeling that the eminent man whose life we are
all about to read, is the hero of a past which is already
remote, and that he did little to make men better
fitted to face a present of which, close as it was to
him, he seems hardly to have dreamed.

EMERSON.

A GREAT interpreter of life ought not himself to
need interpretation, least of all can he need it for
contemporaries. When time has wrought changes of
fashion, mental and social, the critic serves a useful
turn in giving to a poet -or a teacher his true place,
and in recovering ideas and points of view that are
worth preserving. Interpretation of this kind Emer-
son cannot require. His books are no palimpsest,
' the prophet's holograph, defiled, erased, and covered
by a monk's.' What he has written is fresh, legible,
and in full conformity with the manners and the
diction of the day, and those who are unable to under-
stand him without gloss and comment are in fact not
prepared to understand what it is that the original
has to say. Scarcely any literature is so entirely
unprofitable as the so-called criticism that overlays a
pithy text with a windy sermon. For our time at
least Emerson may best be left to be his own
expositor.

Nor is Emerson, either, in the case of those whom
the world has failed to recognise, and whom therefore
it is the business of the critic to make known and to

294 EMEKSON.

defiiie. It is too soon to say in what particular niche
among the teachers of the race posterity will place
him; enough that in our own generation he has already
been accepted as one of the wise masters, who, being
called to high thinking for generous ends, did not
fall below his vocation, but, steadfastly pursuing the
pure search for truth, without propounding a system
or founding a school or cumbering himself overmuch
about applications, lived the life of the spirit, and
breathed into other men a strong desire after the right
governance of the soul. All this is generally realised
and understood, and men may now be left to find
their way to the Emersonian doctrine without the
critic's prompting. Though it is only the other day
that Emerson walked the earth and was alive and
among us, he is already one of the privileged few whom
the reader approaches in the mood of settled respect,
and whose names have surrounded themselves with an
atmosphere of religion.

It is not particularly profitable, again, to seek for
Emerson one of the labels out of the philosophic
handbooks. Was he the prince of Transcendentalists,
or the prince of Idealists? Are we to look for the
sources of his thought in Kant or Jacobi, in Fichte or
Schelling 1 How does he stand towards Parmenides
and Zeno, the Egotheism of the Sufis, or the position
of the Megareans? Shall we put him on the shelf
with the Stoics or the Mystics, with Quietist, Pan-
theist, Determinist? If life were long, it might be
worth while to trace Emerson's affinities with the

EMERSON. 295

philosophic schools ; to collect and infer his answers
to the everlasting problems of psychology and meta-
physics; to extract a set of coherent and reasoned
opinions about knowledge and faculty, experience and
consciousness, truth and necessity, the absolute and
the relative. But such inquiries would only take
us the further away from the essence and vitality
of Emerson's mind and teaching. In philosophy
proper Emerson made no contribution of his own,
but accepted, apparently without much examination
of the other side, from Coleridge after Kant, the
intuitive, h priori and realist theory respecting the
sources of human knowledge, and the objects that
are within the cognisance of the human faculties.
This was his starting-point, and within its own
sphere of thought he cannot be said to have carried
it any further. What he did was to light up these
doctrines with the rays of ethical and poetic ima-
gination. As it has been justly put, though Emer-
sonian transcendentalism is usually spoken of as a
philosophy, it is more justly regarded as a gospel.1
But before dwelling more on this, let us look
into the record of his life, of which we may say
in all truth that no purer, simpler, and more har-
monious story can be found in the annals of far-
shining men.

1 Frothingham's Transcendentalism in New England: a
History — a judicious, acute, and highly interesting piece of
criticism.

296 EMEKSON.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born at Boston, May
25, 1803. He was of an ancient and honourable
English stock, who had transplanted themselves, on
one side from Cheshire and Bedfordshire, and on the
other from Durham and York, a hundred and seventy
years before. For seven or eight generations in a
direct and unbroken line his forefathers had been
preachers and divines, not without eminence in the
Puritan tradition of New England. His second name
came into the family with Rebecca Waldo, with whom
at the end of the seventeenth century one Edward
Emerson had intermarried, and whose family had fled
from the Waldensian valleys and that slaughter of
the saints which Milton called on Heaven to avenge.
Every tributary, then, that made Emerson what he
was, flowed not only from Protestantism, but from
' the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.' When
we are told that Puritanism inexorably locked up the
intelligence of its votaries in a dark and straitened
chamber, it is worthy to be remembered that the
genial, open, lucid, and most comprehensive mind of
Emerson was the ripened product of a genealogical
tree that at every stage of its growth had been vivified
by Puritan sap.

Not many years after his birth, Emerson's mother
was left a widow with narrow means, and he under-
went the wholesome training of frugality in youth.
When the time came, he was sent to Harvard. When

EMERSON. 297

Clough visited America a generation later, the col-
legiate training does not appear to have struck him
very favourably. 'They learn French and history
and German, and a great many more things than in
England, but only imperfectly.' This was said from
the standard of Rugby and Balliol, and the method
that Clough calls imperfect had merits of its own.
The pupil lost much in a curriculum that had a cer-
tain rawness about it, compared with the traditional
culture that was at that moment (1820) just beginning
to acquire a fresh hold within the old gray quad-
rangles of Oxford. On the other hand, the training
at Harvard struck fewer of those superfluous roots
in the mind, which are only planted that they may
be presently cast out again with infinite distraction
and waste.

When his schooling was over, Emerson began to
prepare himself for the ministrations of the pulpit,
and in 1826 and 1827 he preached in divers places.
Two years later he was ordained, and undertook the
charge of an important Unitarian Church in Boston.
It was not very long before the strain of forms,
comparatively moderate as it was in the Unitarian
body, became too heavy to beborne. Emerson found
that he could no longer accept the usual view of the
Communion Service, even in its least sacramental in-
terpretation. To him the rite was purely spiritual in
origin and intent, and at the best only to be retained
as a commemoration. The whole world, he said,
had been full of idols and ordinances and forms,

298 EMERSON.

when ' the Almighty God was pleased to qualify and
send forth a man to teach men that they must serve
him with the heart ; that only that life was religious
which was thoroughly good ; that sacrifice was smoke
and forms were shadows. This man lived and died
true to that purpose ; and now with his blessed word
and life before us, Christians must contend that it is
a matter of vital importance, really a duty, to com-
memorate him by a certain form, whether that form
be agreeable to their understandings or not. Is not
this to make vain the gift of God ? Is not this to
make men forget that not forms but duties — not
names but righteousness and love — are enjoined V

He was willing to continue the service with that
explanation, and on condition that he should not him-
self partake of the bread and wine. The congrega-
tion would fain have kept one whose transparent
purity of soul had attached more than his heresy had
alienated. But the innovation was too great, and
Emerson resigned his charge (1832). For some five
or six years longer he continued occasionally to preach,
and more than one congregation would have accepted
him. But doubts on the subject of public prayer began
to weigh upon his mind. He suspected the practice
by which one man offered up prayer vicariously and
collectively for the assembled congregation. Was not
that too, like the Communion Service, a form that
tended to deaden the spirit 1 Under the influence of
this and other scruples he finally ceased to preach
(1838), and told his friends that henceforth he must

EMEKSON. 299

find his pulpit in the platform of the lecturer. ' I see
not,' he said, ' why this is not the most flexible of all
organs of opinion, from its popularity and from its
newness, permitting you to say what you think, with-
out any shackles of proscription. The pulpit in our
age certainly gives forth an obstructed and uncertain
sound ; and the faith of those in it, if men of genius,
may differ so much from that of those under it as to em-
barrass the conscience of the speaker, because so much
is attributed to him from the fact of standing there.'
The lecture was an important discovery, and it has
had many consequences in American culture. Among
the more undesirable of them has been (certainly not
in Emerson's own case) the importation of the pulpit
accent into subjects where one would be happier with
out it.

Earlier in the same year in which he retired from
his church at Boston, Emerson had lost his young
wife. Though we may well believe that he bore
these agitations with self-control, his health suffered,
and in the spring of 1833 he started for Europe. He
came to be accused of saying captious things about
travelling. There are three wants, he said, that can
never be satisfied : that of the rich who want some-
thing more; that of the sick who want something
different ; and that of the traveller who says, Any-
where but here. Their restlessness, he told his
countrymen, argued want of character. They were
infatuated with ' the rococo toy of Italy.' As if what
was true anywhere were not true everywhere ; and as

300 EMERSON.

if a man, go where he will, can find more beauty 01
worth than he carries. All this was said, as we shall
see that much else was said by Emerson, by way of
reaction and protest against instability of soul in the
people around him. 'Here or nowhere,' said Goethe
inversely to unstable Europeans yearning vaguely
westwards, 'here or nowhere is thine America.' To
the use of travel for its own ends, Emerson was
of course as much alive as other people. 'There
is in every constitution a certain solstice when the
stars stand still in our inward firmament, and
when there is required some foreign force, some
diversion or alteration, to prevent stagnation. And
as a medical remedy, travel seems one of the best.'
He found it so in 1833. But this and his two other
voyages to Europe make no Odyssey. When Vol-
taire was pressed to visit Eome, he declared that he
would be better pleased with some new and free
English book than with all the glories of amphi-
theatre and of arch. Emerson in like manner seems
to have thought more of the great writers whom he
saw in Europe than of buildings or of landscapes.
'Am I,' he said, 'who have hung over their works
in my chamber at home, not to see these men in
the flesh, and thank them, and interchange some
thoughts with them V The two Englishmen to whom
he owed most were Coleridge and Wordsworth ; and
the younger writer, some eight years older than
himself, in whom his liveliest interest had been
kindled, was Carlyle. He was fortunate enough to

EMERSON. 301

have converse with all three, and he has told the
world how these illustrious men in their several
fashions and degrees impressed him.1 It was Car-
lyle who struck him most. ' Many a time upon the
sea, in my homeward voyage, I remembered with
joy the favoured condition of my lonely philosopher,'
cherishing visions more than divine ' in his stern and
blessed solitude.' So Carlyle, with no less cordiality,
declares that among the figures that he could recollect
as visiting his Nithsdale hermitage — ' all like Appari-
tions now, bringing with them airs from Heaven, or
the blasts from the other region, there is not one of
a more undoubtedly supernal character than your-
self ; so pure and still, with intents so charitable ;
and then vanishing too so soon into the azure Inane,
as an Apparition should.'

In external incident Emerson's life was uneventful.
Nothing could be simpler, of more perfect unity, or
more free from disturbing episodes that leaves scars on
men.. In 1834 he settled in old Concord, the home
of his ancestors, then in its third century. ' Concord
is very bare,' wrote Clough, who made some sojourn
there in 1852, 'and so is the country in general; it
is a small sort of village, almost entirely of wood
houses, painted white, with Venetian blinds, green
outside, with two white wooden churches. There
are some American elms of a weeping kind, and

1 English, Traits, 7-18. Ireland, 143-152 Froude's Carlyle,
u. 355-369

302 EMERSON.

sycamores, i.e. planes ; but the wood is mostly pine-
white pine and yellow pine — somewhat scrubby,
occupying the tops of the low banks, and marshy
hay-land between, very brown now. A little brook
runs through to the Concord River.'1 The brook
flowed across the few acres that were Emerson's first
modest homestead. ' The whole external appearance
of the place,' says one who visited him, ' suggests
old-fashioned comfort and hospitality. Within the
house the flavour of antiquity is still more noticeable.
Old pictures look down from the walls ; quaint blue-
and- white china holds the simple dinner ; old furniture
brings to mind the generations of the past. At the
right as you enter is Mr. Emerson's library, a large
square room, plainly furnished, but made pleasant
by pictures and sunshine. The homely shelves that
line the walls are well filled with books. There is
a lack of showy covers or rich bindings, and each
volume seems to have soberly grown old in constant
service. Mr. Emerson's study is a quiet room up-
stairs.'

Fate did not spare him the strokes of the common
lot. His first wife died after three short years of
wedded happiness. He lost a little son, who was the
light of his eyes. But others were born to him, and
in all the relations and circumstances of domestic life
he was one of the best and most beloved of men. He
long carried in his mind the picture of Carlyle's life
at Craigenputtock as the ideal for the sage, but hia

1 Clough's Life and Letters, i. 185.

EMERSON. 303

own choice was far wiser and happier, 'not wholly
in the busy world, nor quite beyond it.'

'Besides my house,' he told Carlyle in 1838, 'I
have, I believe, 22,000 dollars, whose income in
ordinary years is six per cent. I have no other
tithe or glebe except the income of my winter
lectures, which was last winter 800 dollars. Well,
with this income, here at home, I am a rich man.
I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance,
I have food, warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go
away from home, I am rich no longer. I never have
a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise man, I
suppose, ever Avas rich in the sense of freedom to
spend, because of the inundation of claims, so neither
am I, who am not wise. But at home I am rich —
rich enough for ten brothers. My wife Lidian is
an incarnation of Christianity, — I call her Asia, —
and keeps my philosophy from Antinomianism ; my
mother, whitest, mildest, most conservative of ladies,
whose only exception to her universal preference for
old things is her son ; my boy, a piece of love and
sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to
night ; — these, and three domestic women, who cook
and sew and run for us, make all my household.
Here I sit and read and write, with very little system,
and, as far as regards composition, with the most
fragmentary result : paragraphs incompressible, each
sentence an infinitely repellent particle.

' In summer, with the aid of a neighbour, I manage
my garden ; and a week ago I set out on the west

304 EMERSON.

side of my house forty young pine trees to protect
me or my son from the wind of January. The orna-
ment of the place is the occasional presence of some
ten or twelve persons, good and wise, who visit us in
the course of the year.'

As time went on he was able to buy himself 'a
new plaything ' — a piece of woodland, of more than
forty acres, on the border of a little lake half a mile
wide or more, called Walden Pond. ' In these May
days,' he told Carlyle, then passionately struggling
with his Cromwell, with the slums of Chelsea at his
back, 'when maples, poplars, oaks, birches, walnut,
and pine, are in their spring glory, I go thither every
afternoon, and cut with my hatchet an Indian path
through the thicket, all along the bold shore, and
open the finest pictures' (1845).

He loved to write at ' large leisure in noble mornings,
opened by prayer or by readings of Plato, or whatso-
ever else is dearest to the Morning Muse.' Yet he
could not wholly escape the recluse's malady. He
confesses that he sometimes craves ' that stimulation
which every capricious, languid, and languescent study
needs.' Carlyle's potent concentration stirs his
envy. The work of the garden and the orchard he
found very fascinating, eating up days and weeks ;
' nay, a brave scholar should shun it like gambling,
and take refuge in cities and hotels from these per-
nicious enchantments. '

In the doings of his neighbourhood he bore his
part; he took a manly interest in civil affairs, and

EMERSON. 305

was sensible, shrewd, and helpful in matters of
practical judgment. Pilgrims, sane and insane, the
beardless and the gray-headed, flocked to his door,
far beyond the dozen persons good and wise whom
he had mentioned to Carlyle. ' Uncertain, troubled,
earnest wanderers through the midnight of the moral
world beheld his intellectual fire as a beacon burning
on a hill- top, and climbing the difficult ascent, looked
forth into the surrounding obscurity more hopefully
than hitherto ' (Rawtlwrne). To the most intractable
of Transcendental bores, worst species of the genus,
he was never impatient, nor denied himself ; nor did
he ever refuse counsel where the case was not yet
beyond hope. Hawthorne was for a time his neigh-
bour (1842-45). 'It was good,' says Hawthorne, 'to
meet him in the wood-paths, or sometimes in our
avenue, with that pure intellectual gleam diffused
about his presence like the garment of a shining one ;
and he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension,
encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive
more than he could impart.'

The most remarkable of all his neighbours was
Thoreau, who for a couple of years lived in a hut which
he had built for himself on the shore of Walden Pond.
If he had not written some things with a consider-
able charm of style, Thoreau might have been wisely
neglected as one of the crazy. But Emerson was
struck by the originality of his life, and thought it
well in time to edit the writings of one ' who was bred
to no profession ; never married ; lived alone ; never

VOL. I. X

306 EMEKSON.

went to Church ; never voted ; refused to pay a tax to
the State ; ate no flesh, drank no wine, never knew
the use of tobacco ; had no temptations to fight against,
no appetites, no passions , refused all invitations, pre-
ferred a good Indian to highly cultivated people, and
said he would rather go to Oregon than to London.'
The world has room for every type, so that it be not
actively noxious, and this whimsical egotist may well
have his place in the catalogue. He was, after all,
in his life only a compendium, on a scale large enough
to show their absurdity, of all those unsocial notions
which Emerson in othermanifestations found it needful
to rebuke. Yet we may agree that many of his para-
doxes strike home with Socratic force to the heart of
a civilisation that wise men know to be too purely
material, too artificial, and too capriciously diffused.

Emerson himself was too sane ever to fall into the
hermit's trap of banishment to the rocks and echoes.
' Solitude,' he said, ' is impracticable, and society fatal.'
He steered his way as best he could between these
two irreconcilable necessities. He had, as we have
seen, the good sense to make for himself a calling
which brought him into healthy contact with bodies
of men, and made it essential that he should have his
listeners in some degree in his mind, even when they
were not actually present to the eye. As a preacher
Emerson has been described as making a deep impres-
sion on susceptible hearers of a quiet mind, ^b~y l the calm
dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical
effort, and the singular simplicity and directness of

EMEKSON. 307

a manner free from the least trace of dogmatic
assumption.' 'Not long before,' says this witness, 'I
had listened to a wonderful sermon by Chalmers,
whose force and energy, and vehement but rather
turgid eloquence, carried for the moment all before
him — his audience becoming like clay in the hands
of the potter. But I must confess that the pregnant
thoughts and serene self-possession of the young
Boston minister had a greater charm for me than all
the rhetorical splendours of Chalmers' {Ireland, 141).

At the lecturer's desk the same attraction made
itself still more effectually felt. ' I have heard some
great speakers and some accomplished orators,' Mr.
Lowell says, ' but never any that so moved and per-
suaded men as he. There is a kind of undertone in
that rich barytone of his that sweeps our minds from
their foothold into deep waters with a drift that we
cannot and would not resist. Search for his eloquence
in his books and you will perchance miss it, but
meanwhile you will find that it has kindled all your
thoughts.' The same effect was felt in its degree
wherever he went, and he took pains not to miss it.
He had made a study of his art, and was so skilful
in his mastery of it that it seemed as if anybody might
do all that he did and do it as well — if only a
hundred failures had not proved the mistake.

In 1838 Emerson delivered an address in the
Divinity School of Harvard, which produced a gusty
shower of articles, sermons, and pamplets, and raised
him without will or further act of his to the hitch

308 EMEKSON.

place of the heresiai'ch. With admirable singleness of
mind, he held modestly aloof. ' There is no scholar,'
he wrote to a friend, ' less willing or less able to be
a polemic. I could not give account of myself if
challenged. I delight in telling what I think, but
if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I
am the most helpless of men.' The year before,
his oration on the American Scholar had filled
Carlyle with delight. It was the first clear utter-
ance, after long decades of years, in which he had
'heard nothing but infinite jangling and jabbering,
and inarticulate twittering and screeching.' Then
Carlyle enjoined on his American friend for rule of life,
' Give no ear to any man's praise or censure ; know
that that is not it ; on the one side is as Heaven, if
you have strength to keep silent and climb unseen ;
yet on the other side, yawning always at one's right
hand and one's left, is the frightfullest Abyss and
Pandemonium ' (Dec. 8, 1837). Emerson's tempera-
ment and his whole method made the warning need-
less, and, as before, while 'vociferous platitude was
dinning his ears on all sides,' a whole world of thought
was 'silently building itself in these calm depths.'
But what would those two divinities of his, Plato
and Socrates, have said of a man who ' could not give
an account of himself if challenged '? Assuredly not
every one who saith Plato, Plato, is admitted to that
ideal kingdom.

It was soon after this that the Dial was projected.
It had its origin in the Transcendental Club, a little

EMERSON. 309

knot of speculative students at Boston, who met four
or five times a year at one another's houses to discuss
questions mainly theological, from more liberal points
of view than was at that time common, ' the air then in
America getting a little too close and stagnant.' The
Club was first formed in 1836. The Dial appeared in
1840, and went on for four years at quarterly intervals.
Emerson was a constant contributor, and for the last
half of its existence he acted as editor. ' I submitted,'
he told Carlyle, 'to what seemed a necessity of
petty literary patriotism — I know not what else to
call it — and took charge of our thankless little Dial
here, without subscribers enough to pay even a pub-
lisher, much less any labourer ; it has no penny for
editor or contributor, nothing but abuse in the news-
papers, or, at best, silence ; but it serves as a sort of
portfolio, to carry about a few poems or sentences
which would otherwise be transcribed or circulated,
and we always are waiting until somebody shall come
and make it good. But I took it, and it took me and a
great deal of good time to a small purpose' (July 1,
1842). On the whole one must agree that it was to
small purpose. Emerson's name has reflected lustre
on the Dial, but when his contributions are taken
out, and, say, half a dozen besides, the residuum is in
the main very poor stuff, and some of it has a droll
resemblance to the talk between Mrs. Hominy and
the Literary Ladies and the Honourable Elijah
Pogram. Margaret Fuller — the Miranda, Zenobia,
Hypatia, Minerva of her time, and a truly remark-

310 EMERSON.

able figure in the gallery of wonderful women —
edited it for two years, and contributed many a vivid,
dashing, exuberant, ebullient page. Her criticism oi
Goethe, for example, contains no final or valid word,
but it is fresh, cordial, and frank, and no other prose
contributor, again saving the one great name, has
anything to say that is so readable. Nearly all the
rest is extinct, and the Dial now finds itself far away
from the sunshine of human interest.

In 1841 the first series of Emerson's Essays was pub-
lished, and three years later the second. The Poems
were first collected in 1847, but the final version was
not made until 1876. In 1847 Emerson paid his
second visit to England, and delivered his lectures
on Representative Men, collected and published in
1850. The books are said to have had a very slow
sale, but the essays and lectures published in 1860,
with the general title of The Conduct of Life, started
with a sale of 2,500 copies, though that volume has
never been considered by the Emersonian adept to
contain most of the pure milk of the Word.

Then came that great event in the history of men
and institutions, the Civil War. We look with anxiety
for the part played by the serene thinker when the
hour had struck for violent and heroic action. Emer-
son had hitherto been a Free Soiler ; he had opposed
the extension of slavery ; and he favoured its com-
pulsory extinction, with compensation on the plan of
our own policy in the West Indies. He had never
joined the active Abolitionists, nor did he see 'that

EMEESON. 311

there was any particular thing for him to do in it then.'
' Though I sometimes accept a popular call, and preach
on Temperance or the Abolition of Slavery, I am sure
to feel, before I have done with it, what an intrusion
it is into another sphere, and so much loss of virtue
in my own ' {To Carlyle, 1844). But he missed no occa-
sion of showing that in conviction and aim he was with
good men. The infirmities of fanatics never hid from
him either the transcendent purity of their motives or
the grandeur of their cause. This is ever the test of
the scholar : whether he allows intellectual fastidious-
ness to stand between him and the great issues of his
time. ' Cannot the English,' he cried out to Carlyle,
' leave cavilling at petty failures and bad manners and
at the dunce part, and leap to the suggestions and
finger-pointings of the gods, which, above the under-
standing, feed the hopes and guide the wills of men?'
These finger-pointings Emerson did not mistake. He
spoke up for Garrison. John Brown was several
times in Concord, and found a hearty welcome in
Emerson's house. When Brown made his raid at
Harper's Ferry, and the crisis became gradually
sharper, Emerson felt that the time had come, and
his voice was raised in clear tones. After the sword
is drawn, it is deeds not words that interest and decide ;
but whenever the word of the student was needed
Emerson was ready to give the highest expression to
all that was best in his countrymen's mood during
that greatest ordeal of our time. The inward re-
generation of the individual had ever been the key

312 EMERSON.

to his teaching, and this teaching had been one of the
forces that, like central fire in men's minds, nourished
the heroism of the North in its immortal battle.

The exaltation of national character produced by
the Civil War opened new and wider acceptance for
a great moral and spiritual teacher, and from the
close of the war until his death in 1882, Emerson's
ascendency within his own sphere of action was
complete, and the public recognition of him universal.
Of stoiy, there is no more to tell. He pursued
his old way of reading, meditating, conversing, and
puhlic lecturing, almost to the end. The afternoon
of his life was cloudless as the earlier day, and the
shades of twilight fell in unbroken serenity. - In his
last years there was a partial failure of his memory,
and more than one pathetic story is told of this
tranquil and gradual eclipse. But ' to the last, even
when the events of yesterday were occasionally ob-
scured, his memory of the remote past was unclouded;
he would tell about the friends of his early and middle
life with unbroken vigour.' So, tended in his home
by warm filial devotion, and surrounded by the rever-
ent kindness of his village neighbours, this wise and
benign man slowly passed away (April 27, 1882).1

1 The reader who seeks full information about Emerson's
life will find it scattered in various volumes : among them are —

Ralph Waldo Emerson; by George Willis Cooke (Sampson
Low & Co. , 1882) — a very diligent and instructive work.

R. W. E. ; by Alexander Ireland (Simpkin, Marshall, & Co.
1882), described by Carlyle, and known by others, as ' full
of energy and broad sagacity and practicality ; infinitely well

EMERSON. 313

II.

It cannot be truly said that Emerson is one of the
writers who make their way more easily into our
minds by virtue of style. That his writing has quality
and flavour none but a pure pedant would deny. His
more fervent votaries, however, provoke us with a
challenge that goes far beyond this. They declare
that the finish, charm, and beauty of the writing are
as worthy of remark as the truth and depth of the
thought. It is even ' unmatchable and radiant,' says
one. Such exaggerations can have no reference to any
accepted standard. It would in truth, have been a
marvel if Emerson had excelled in the virtues of the
written page, for most of his published work was
originally composed and used for the platform. Every-
body knows how different are the speaker's devices
for gaining possession of his audience, from the writer's
means of winning, persuading, and impressing the
attention of his reader. The key to the difference
may be that in the speech the personality of the
orator before our eyes gives of itself that oneness and
continuity of communication, which the writer has to
seek in the orderly sequence and array of marshalled

affected to the man Emerson too,' — and full moreover of that
intellectual enthusiasm which in his Scotch countrymen goes so
often with their practicalities.

Emerson, at Home and Abroad; by Moncure D. Conway
(Triibner & Co., 1883): the work of a faithful disciple, who
knew Emerson well, and has here recorded many interesting
anecdotes and traits.

314 EMERSON.

sentence and well-sustained period. One of the traits
that every critic notes in Emerson's writing, is that it
is so abrupt, so sudden in its transitions, so discon-
tinuous, so inconsecutive. Dislike of a sentence that
drags made him unconscious of the quality, that French
critics name coulant. Everything is thrown in just as
it comes, and sometimes the pell-mell is enough to
persuade us that Pope did not exaggerate when he
said that no one qualification is so likely to make a
good writer, as the power of rejecting his own
thoughts.

His manner as a lecturer, says Dr. Holmes, was
an illustration of his way of thinking. ' He would
lose his place just as his mind would drop its thought
and pick up another, twentieth cousin or no relation
at all to it.' The same manner, whether we liken it
to mosaic or to kaleidoscope, marks his writing. It
makes him hard to follow, oracular, and enigmati-
cal. ' Can you tell me,' asked one of his neighbour,
while Emerson was lecturing, ' what connection there
is between that last sentence and the one that went
before, and what connection it all has with Plato 1 '
' None, my friend, save in God ! ' This is excellent
in a seer, but less so in the writer.

Apart from his difficult staccato, Emerson is not free
from secondary faults. He uses words that are not only
odd, but vicious in construction; he is not always gram-
matically correct ; he is sometimes oblique, and he is
often clumsy ; and there is a visible feeling after
epigrams that do not alwaj^s come. When people say

EMEESON. 315

that Emerson's style must be good and admirable
because it fits his thought, they forget that though it
is well that a robe should fit, there is still something
to be said about its cut and fashion.

No doubt, to borrow Carlyle's expression, 'the
talent is not the chief question here : the idea — that is
the chief question.' We do not profess to be of those
to whom mere style is as dear as it was to Plutarch ;
of him it was said that he would have made Pompey
win the battle of Pharsalia, if it could have given a
better turn to a phrase. It would not be worth while
to speak of form in a thinker to whom our debt is so
large for his matter, if there were not so much bad
literary imitation of Emerson. Dr. Holmes mourn-
fully admits that ' one who talks like Emerson or like
Carlyle soon finds himself surrounded by a crowd of
walking phonographs, who mechanically reproduce his
mental and oral accents. Emerson was before long
talking in the midst of a babbling Simonetta of echoes.'
Inferior writers have copied the tones of the oracle
without first making sure of the inspiration. They for-
get that a platitude is not turned into a profundity
by being dressed up as a conundrum. Pithiness in
him dwindles into tenuity in them ; honest discon-
tinuity in the master is made an excuse for finical
incoherencies in the disciples ; the quaint, ingenious,
and unexpected collocations of the original degenerate
in the imitators into a trick of unmeaning surprise
and vapid antithesis ; and his pregnant sententious-
ness set the fashion of a sententiousness that is not

316 EMERSON.

fertility but only hydropsy. This curious infection,
which has spread into divers forms of American litera-
ture that are far removed from philosophy, would have
been impossible if the teacher had been as perfect in
expression as he was pure, diligent, and harmonious
in his thinking.

Yet, as happens to all fine minds, there came to
Emerson ways of expression deeply marked with
character. On every page there is set the strong
stamp of sincerity, and the attraction of a certain
artlessness ; the most awkward sentence rings true ;
and there is often a pure and simple note that touches
us more than if it were the perfection of elaborated
melody. The uncouth procession of the periods dis-
closes the travail of the thought, and that too is a kind
of eloquence. An honest reader easily forgives the
rude jolt or unexpected start when it shows a
thinker faithfully working his way along arduous
and unworn tracks. Even at the roughest, Emerson
often interjects a delightful cadence. As he says of
Landor, his sentences are cubes which will stand
firm, place them how or where you will. He criticised
Swedenborg for being superfluously explanatory, and
having an exaggerated feeling of the ignorance of men.
'Men take truths of this nature,' said Emerson, 'very
fast ; ' and his own style does no doubt very boldly
take this capacity for granted in us. In ' choice and
pith of diction,' again, of which Mr. Lowell speaks, he
hits the mark with a felicity that is almost his own in
this generation. He is terse, concentrated, and free

EMERSON. 317

from the important blunder of mistaking intellectual
dawdling for meditation. Nor in fine does his abrupt-
ness ever impede a true urbanity. The accent is
homely and the apparel plain, but his bearing has
a friendliness, a courtesy, a hospitable humanity,
which goes nearer to our hearts than either literary
decoration or rhetorical unction. That modest and
lenient fellow-feeling which gave such charm to his
companionship breathes in his gravest writing, and
prevents us from finding any page of it cold or hard
or dry.

Though Emerson was always urgent for ' the soul
of the world, clean from all vestige of tradition,' yet
his work is full of literature. He at least lends no
support to the comforting fallacy of the indolent,
that originating power does not go with assimilating
power. Few thinkers on his level display such
breadth of literary reference. Unlike Words-
worth, who was content with a few tattered
volumes on a kitchen shelf, Emerson worked among
books. When he was a boy he found a volume of
Montaigne, and he never forgot the delight and
wonder in which he lived with it. His library is de-
scribed as filled with well-selected authors, with curious
works from the eastern world, with many editions
in both Greek and English of his favourite Plato;
while portraits of Shakespeare, Montaigne, Goethe,
Dante, looked down upon him from the walls. Pro-
duce a volume of Plato or of Shakespeare, he says
somewhere, or 'only remind us of their names,' and

318 EMEKSON.

instantly we come into a feeling of longevity. That
is the scholar's speech. Opening a single essay at
random, we find in it citations from Montesquieu,
Schiller, Milton, Herodotus, Shelley, Plutarch, Frank-
lin, Bacon, Van Helmont, Goethe. So little does
Emerson lend himself to the idle vanity of seeking all
the treasures of wisdom in his own head, or neglect-
ing the hoarded authority of the ages. It is true that
he held the unholy opinion that a translation is as
good as the original, or better. Nor need we suppose
that he knew that pious sensation of the book-lover,
the feel of a library ; that he had any of the collec-
tor's amiable foolishness about rare editions ; or that
he nourished festive thoughts of 'that company of
honest old fellows in their leathern jackets in his
study,' as comrades in a sober old-world conviviality.
His books were for spiritual use, like maps and
charts of the mind of man, and not much for
'excellence of divertisement.' He had the gift of
bringing his reading to bear easily upon the tenor
of his musings, and knew how to use books as an aid
to thinking, instead of letting them take the edge off
thought. There was assuredly nothing of the compiler
or the erudite collegian in him. It is a graver defect
that he introduces the great names of literature with-
out regard for true historical perspective in their place,
either in relation to one another, or to the special
phases of social change and shifting time. Still let
his admirers not forget that Emerson was in his own
way Scholar no less than Sage.

EMERSON. 319

A word or tAvo must be said of Emerson's verses.
He disclaimed, for his own part, any belief that they
were poems. Enthusiasts, however, have been found
to declare that Emerson ' moves more constantly than
any recent poet in the atmosphere of poesy. Since
Milton and Spenser no man — not even Goethe — has
equalled Emerson in this trait.' The Problem, accord-
ing to another, ' is wholly unique, and transcends all
contemporary verse in grandeur of style.' Such poetry,
they say, is like Westminster Abbey, 'though the Abbey
is inferior in boldness.' Yet, strangely enough, while
Emerson's poetic form is symbolised by the flowing
lines of Gothic architecture, it is also ' akin to Doric
severity.' With all the good will in the world, I do
not find myself able to rise to these heights ; in fact,
they rather seem to deserve Wordsworth's description,
as mere obliquities of admiration.

Taken as a whole, Emerson's poetry is of that kind
which springs, not from excitement of passion or feel-
ing, but from an intellectual demand for intense and
sublimated expression. We see the step that lifts
him straight from prose to verse, and that step is the
shortest possible. The flight is awkward and even
uncouth, as if nature had intended feet rather than
wings. It is hard to feel of Emerson, any more than
Wordsworth could feel of Goethe, that his poetry is
inevitable. The measure, the colour, the imaginative
figures, are the product of search, not of spontaneous
movements of sensation and reflection combining in
a harmony that is delightful to the ear. They are the

320 EMERSON.

outcome of a discontent with prose, not of that high-
strung sensibility which compels the true poet into
verse. This must not be said without exception. TJie
Threnody, written after the death of a deeply loved
child, is a beautiful and impressive lament. Pieces
like Musquetaquid, the Adirondacs, the Snowstorm, The
Humble-Bee, are pretty and pleasant bits of pastoral.
In all we feel the pure breath of nature, and

The primal mind,
That flows in streams, that breathes in wind.

There is a certain charm of naivete', that recalls the
unvarnished simplicity of the Italian painters before
Raphael. But who shall say that he discovers that
'spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,' which a
great poet has made the fundamental element of
poetry ? There are too few melodious progressions ;
the melting of the thought with natural images and
with human feeling is incomplete ; we miss the charm
of perfect assimilation, fusion, and incorporation ; and
in the midst of all the vigour and courage of his work,
Emerson has almost forgotten that it is part of the
poet's business to give pleasure. It is true that
pleasure is sometimes undoubtedly to be had from
verse that is not above mediocrity, and Wordsworth
once designed to write an essay examining why bad
poetry pleases. Poetry that pleases may be bad, but
it is equally true that no poetry which fails to please
can be really good. Some one says that gems of ex-
pression make Emerson's essays oracular and his verse

EMERSON. 321

prophetic. But, to borrow Horace's well-known phrase,
'tis not enough that poems should be sublime ; dulcia
sunto, — they must be touching and sympathetic. Only
a bold critic will say that this is a mark of Emerson's
poems. They are too naked, unrelated, and cosmic ;
too little clad with the vesture of human associations.
Light and shade do not alternate in winning and
rich relief, and as Carlyle found it, the radiance is
'thin piercing,' leaving none of the sweet and dim
recesses so dear to the lover of nature. We may,
however, well be content to leave a man of Emer-
son's calibre to choose his own exercises. It is best
to suppose that he knew what he was about when
he wandered into the fairyland of verse, and that in
such moments he found nothing better to his hand.
Yet if we are bidden to place him among the poets,
it is enough to open Keats at the Ode to a Nightingale,
or Shelley at The Cloud, the Skylark, or the Sensitive
Plant, or Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey, or Goethe at
Das Gbttliche, or Victor Hugo in the Contemplations.
Then in spite of occasional formality of rhythm and
artifice in ornament, we cannot choose but perceive
how tuneful is their music, how opulent the resources
of their imagination, how various, subtle, and pene-
trating their affinity for the fortunes and sympathies
of men, and next how modest a portion of all these
rare and exquisite qualifications reveals itself in the
verse of Emerson.

vol. L

322 EMERSON.

III.

Few minds of the first order that have busied them-
selves in contemplating the march of human fortunes,
have marched forward in a straight line of philosophic
speculation unbroken to the end. Like Burke, like
Coleridge, like Wordsworth, at a given point they have
a return upon themselves. Having mastered the
truths of one side, their eyes open to what is true on
the other ; the work of revolution finished or begun,
they experience fatigue and reaction. In Hawthorne's
romance, after Miles Coverdale had passed his spring
and summer among the Utopians of Blithedale, he felt
that the time had come when he must for sheer
sanity's sake go and hold a little talk with the Con-
servatives, the merchants, the politicians, 'and all
those respectable old blockheads, who still in this
intangibility and mistiness of affairs kept a death-grip
on one or two ideas which had not come into vogue
since yesterday morning.' ' No sagacious man,' says
Hawthorne, ' will long retain his sagacity if he lives
exclusively among reformers and progressive people,
without periodically returning into the settled system
of things, to correct himself by a new observation from
that old stand-point.' Yet good men rightly hoped
that ' out of the very thoughts that were wildest and
most destructive might grow a wisdom, holy, calm,
and pure, and that should incarnate itself with the
substance of a noble and happy life.' Now that we
are able to look back on the crisis of the times that

EMERSON. 323

Hawthorne describes, we perceive that it was as he
expected, and that in the person of Emerson the fer-
ment and dissolvency of thought worked itself out in
a strain of wisdom of the highest and purest.

In 1842 Emerson told Carlyle, in vindication of
the Dial and its transcendentalisms, that if the direc-
tion of their speculations was as deplorable as Carlyle
declared, it was yet a remarkable fact for history that
all the bright young men and young women in New
England, ' quite ignorant of each other, take the world
so, and come and make confession to fathers and
mothers — the boys, that they do not wish to go into
trade ; the girls, that they do not like morning calls
and evening parties. They are all religious, but
hate the churches; they reject all the ways of liv-
ing of other men, but have none to offer in their
stead.'

It is worth while to transcribe from the Dial itself
the scene at one of the many Bostonian Conventions of
that date — the Friends of Universal Progress, in 1840 :
— 'The composition of the Assembly was rich and
various. ■ The singularity and latitude of the summons
drew together, from all parts of New England, and
also from the Middle States, men of every shade of
opinion, from the straightest orthodoxy to the wildest
heresy, and many persons whose church was a church
of one member only. A great variety of dialect and
of costume was noticed; a great deal of confusion,
eccentricity, and freak appeared, as well as of zeal and
enthusiasm. If the Assembly was disorderly, it was

324 EMERSON.

picturesque. Madmen, madwomen, men with beards,
Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, G-roaners, Ag-
rarians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists,
Calvinists, Unitarians, and philosophers, all came
successively to the top, and seized their moment, if
not their hour, wherein to chide or pray or preach or
protest. The faces were a study. The most daring
innovators, and the champions-until-death of the old
cause, sat side by side. The still living merit of the
oldest New England families, glowing yet after several
generations, encountered the founders of families,
fresh merit emerging and expanding the brows to a
new breadth, and lighting a clownish face with sacred
fire. The Assembly was characterised by the pre-
dominance of a certain plain sylvan strength and
earnestness' (Dial, iii. 101).

If the shade of Bossuet could have looked down
upon the scene, he would have found fresh material
for the sarcasms which a hundred and fifty years be-
fore he had lavished on the Variations of the Pro-
testant Churches. Yet this curious movement, bleak
and squalid as it may seem to men nurtured in the
venerable decorum of ecclesiastical tradition, was at
bottom identical with the yearning for stronger
spiritual emotions, and the cravings of religious zeal,
that had in older times filled monasteries, manned
the great orders, and sent wave upon wave of pilgrims
and crusaders to holy places. ' It is really amazing,'
as was said by Franklin or somebody else of his fashion
of utilitarianism, that one of the passions which it is

EMERSON. 325

hardest to develop in man is the passion for his own
material comfort and temporal well-being.'

Emerson has put on record this mental intoxication
of the progressive people around him, with a pungency
that might satisfy the Philistines themselves.1 From
1820 to 1844, he said, New England witnessed a
general criticism and attack on institutions, and in all
practical activities a gradual withdrawal of tender
consciences from the social organisations. Calvinists
and Quakers began to split into old school and new
school. Goethe and the Germans became known.
Swedenborg, in spite of his taint of craziness, by the
mere prodigy of his speculations, began ' to spread him-
self into the minds of thousands' — including in no
unimportant degree the mind of Emerson himself.2
Literary criticism counted for something in the uni-
versal thaw, and even the genial humanity of Dickens
helped to break up the indurations of old theology.
Most powerful of all was the indirect influence of
science. Geology disclosed law in an unsuspected
region, and astronomy caused men to apprehend that
' as the earth is not the centre of the Universe, so it
is not the special scene or stage on which the drama
of divine justice is played before the assembled angels
of heaven.'

A temper of scrutiny and dissent broke out in

1 New England Reformers : Essays, ii. 511-519.

2 The Swedenborgians — 'a sect which, I think, must contri-
bute more than all other sects to the new faith, which must
come out of all.' — To Carlylc, 1834.

326 EMERSON.

every direction. In almost every relation men and
women asked themselves by what right Conformity
levied its tax, and whether they were not false to their
own consciences in paying it. ' What a fertility of
projects for the salvation of the world ! One apostle
thought that all men should go to farming ; and an-
other thought that no man should buy or sell — that
use of money was the cardinal evil ; another thought
the mischief was in our diet — that we eat and
drink damnation. These made unleavened bread, and
were foes to the death to fermentation. Others at-
tacked the system of agriculture, the use of animal
manures in farming, and the tyranny of man over
brute instinct. These abuses polluted his food. The
ox must be taken from the plough, and the horse from
the cart; the hundred acres of the farm must be
spaded, and the man must walk wherever boats and
locomotives will not carry him. . . . Others assailed
particular vocations. . . . Others attacked the insti-
tution of marriage as the fountain of social evils. .
Who gave me the money with which I bought my
coat1? Why should professional labour and that of
the counting-house be paid so disproportionately to
the labour of the porter and the woodsawer 1 Am I
not too protected a person ? Is there not a wide dis-
parity between the lot of me and the lot of thee, my
poor brother, my poor sister ? '

One of Emerson's glories is, that while wise enough
to discern the peril and folly of these excesses, he
was under no temptation to fall back. It was giddy

EMERSON. 327

work, but he kept his eye on the fixed stars. Cer-
tainly Emerson was not assailed by the stress of mighty
and violent events, as Burke and Wordsworth were in
some sense turned into reactionaries by the calamities
of revolution in France. The 'distemper of enthusi-
asm,' as Shaftesbury would have called it, took a mild
and harmless form in New England : there the work
in hand was not the break-up of a social system, but
only the mental evolution of new ideals, the struggle
of an ethical revival, and the satisfaction of a livelier
spirit of scruple. In face of all delirations, Emerson
kept on his way of radiant sanity and perfect poise.
Do not, he warned his enthusiasts, expend all energy
on some accidental evil, and so lose sanity and power
of benefit. ' 7/ is of little moment that one or two or
twenty errors of our social system be corrected, hit of much
that the man be in his senses. Society gains nothing
whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to
renovate things around him ; he has become tediously
good in some particular, but negligent or narrow in
the rest, and hypocrisy and vanity are often the dis-
gusting result. It is handsomer to remain in the
establishment, better than the establishment, and con-
duct that in the best manner, than to make a sally
against evil by some single improvement, without
supporting it by a total regeneration.'

Emerson, then, is one of the few moral reformers
whose mission lay in calming men rather than in rous-
ing them, and in the inculcation of serenity rather than
in the spread of excitement. Though he had been

328 EMERSON.

ardent in protest against the life conventional, as soon
as the protest ran off into extravagance, instead of
either following or withstanding it with rueful petu-
lancies, he delicately and successfully turned a passing
agitation into an enduring revival. The last password
given hy the dying Antonine to the officer of the
watch was ^qaanimitas. In a brighter, wider, and
more living sense than was possible even to the noblest
in the middle of the second century, this, too, was the
watchword of the Emersonian teaching. Instead of
cultivating the tormenting and enfeebling spirit of
scruple, instead of multiplying precepts, he bade
men not to crush their souls out under the burden of
Duty ; they are to remember that a wise life is not
wholly filled up by commandments to do and to abstain
from doing. Hence, we have in Emerson the teaching
of a vigorous morality without the formality of dogma
and the deadly tedium of didactics. If not laughter,
of which only Shakespeare among the immortals has a
copious and unfailing spring, there is at least gaiety
in every piece, and a cordial injunction to men to find
joy in their existence to the full. Happiness is with
him an aim that we are at liberty to seek directly and
without periphrasis. Provided men do not lose their
balance by immersing themselves in their pleasures,
they are right, according to Emerson, in pursuing
them. But joy is no neighbour to artificial ecstasy.
What Emerson counsels the poet, he intended in its
own way and degree for all men. The poet's habit
of living, he says beautifully, should be set on a key so

EMERSON. 329

low that the commonest influences should delight him.
' That spirit which suffices quiet hearts, which seems
to come forth to such from every dry knoll of sere
grass, from every pine-stump and half-emhedded stone
on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to
the poor and hungry, and such as are of simple taste.
If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with
fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded
senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find
no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the
pinewoods' (ii. 328).

It was perhaps the same necessity of having to
guide men away from the danger of transcendental
aberrations, while yet holding up lofty ideals of
conduct, that made Emerson say something about
many traits of conduct to which the ordinary high-
flying moralist of the treatise or the pulpit seldom
deigns to stoop. The essays on Domestic Life, on
Behaviour, on Manners, are examples of the attention
that Emerson paid to the right handling of the outer
conditions of a wise and brave life. With him small
circumstances are the occasions of great qualities.
The parlour and the counting-house are as fit scenes
for fortitude, self-control, considerateness, and vision,
as the senate or the battlefield. He re-classifies the
virtues. No modern, for example, has given so re-
markable . a place to Friendship among the sacred
necessities of well-endowed character. Neither Plato
nor Cicero, least of all Bacon, has risen to so noble
and profound a conception of this most strangely

330 EMERSON.

commingled of all human affections. There is no
modern thinker, again, who makes Beauty — all that
is gracious, seemly, and becoming — so conspicuous
and essential a part of life. It would he inexact to
say that Emerson blended the beautiful with the
precepts of duty or of prudence into one complex
sentiment, as the Greeks did, but his theory of excel-
lence might be better described than any other of
modern times by the Ko.XoKa.yo.6ca, the virtue of
the true gentleman, as set down in Plato and Aris-
totle.

So untrue is it that in his quality of Sage
Emerson always haunted the perilous altitudes of Tran-
scendentalism, 'seeing nothing under him but the
everlasting snows of Himalaya, the Earth shrinking
to a Planet, and the indigo Firmament sowing
itself with daylight stars.' He never thinks it
beneath his dignity to touch a point of minor
morals, or to say a good word for what he somewhere
calls subterranean prudence. Emerson values mun-
dane circumspection as highly as Franklin, and gives
to manners and rules of daily behaviour an importance
that might have satisfied Chesterfield. In fact, the
worldly and the selfish are mistaken when they as-
sume that Common Sense is their special and exclusive
portion. The small Transcendentalist goes in search
of truth with the meshes of his net so large that he
takes no fish. His landscapes are all horizon. It is
only the great idealists, like Emerson, who take care
not to miss the real.

EMERSON. 331

The remedy for the break-down of the old churches
would, in the mind of the egotist, have been to found
a new one. But Emerson knew well before Carlyle
told him, that ' no truly great man, from Jesus Christ
downwards, ever founded a sect — I mean wilfully
intended founding one.' Not only did he establish
no sect, but he preached a doctrine that was positively
incompatible with the erection of any sect upon its
base. His whole hope for the world lies in the in-
ternal and independent resources of the individual.
If mankind is to be raised to a higher plane of happi-
ness and worth, it can only be by the resolution of
each to live his own life with fidelity and courage.
The spectacle of one liberated from the malign ob-
structions to free human character, is a stronger in-
centive to others than exhortation, admonition, or
any sum of philanthropical association. If I, in my
own person and daily walk, quietly resist heaviness
of custom, coldness of hope, timidity of faith, then
without wishing, contriving, or even knowing it, I am
a light silently drawing as many as have vision and
are fit to walk in the same path. Whether I do that
or not, I am at least obeying the highest law of my
own being.

In the appeal to the individual to be true to him-
self, Emerson does not stand apart from other great
moral reformers. His distinction lies in the peculiar
direction that he gives to his appeal. All those
regenerators of the individual, from Rousseau down
to J. S. Mill, who derived their first principles, whether

332 EMERSON.

directly or indirectly, from Locke and the philosophy
of sensation, experience, and acquisition, began opera-
tions with the will. They laid all their stress on the
shaping of motives by education, institutions, and
action, and placed virtue in deliberateness and in exer-
cise. Emerson, on the contrary, coming from the
intuitional camp, holds that our moral nature is
vitiated by any interference of our will. Translated
into the language of theology, his doctrine makes
regeneration to be a result of grace, and the guide of
conscience to be the indwelling light ; though, unlike
the theologians, he does not trace either of these
mysterious gifts to the special choice and intervention
of a personal Deity. Impulsive and spontaneous
innocence is higher than the strength to conquer
temptation. The natural motions of the soul are so
much better than the voluntary ones. ' There is no
such thing as manufacturing a strong will,' for all
great force is real and elemental. In all this Emerson
suffers from the limitations that are inseparable from
pure spiritualism in all its forms. As if the spiritual
constitution were ever independent of the material
organisation bestowed upon the individual at the
moment when he is conceived, or of the social condi-
tions that close about him from the instant of his
birth. The reaction, however, against what was
superficial in the school of the eighteenth century
went to its extreme length in Emerson, and blinded
his eyes to the wisdom, the profundity, and the
fruitfulness of their leading speculations. It is

EMEESON. 333

enough for us to note the fact in passing, without
plunging into contention on the merits. All thoughts
are always ready, potentially if not actually. Each
age selects and assimilates the philosophy that is most
apt for its wants. Institutions needed regeneration
in France, and so those thinkers came into vogue and
power who laid most stress on the efficacy of good
institutions. In Emerson's America, the fortunes of
the country made external circumstances safe for a
man, and his chance was assured ; so a philosophy
was welcomed which turned the individual inwards
upon himself, and taught him to consider his own
character and spiritual faculty as something higher
than anything external could ever be.

Again to make a use which is not unins tractive ol
the old tongue, Emerson is for faith before works.
Nature, he says, will not have us fret and fume. She
does not like our benevolences, our churches, our
pauper- societies, much better than she likes our
frauds and wars. They are but so many yokes to the
neck. Our painful labours are unnecessary and fruit-
less. A higher law than that of our will regulates
events. If we look wider, things are all alike : laws
and creeds and modes of living are a travesty of truth.
Only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we
strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience
we become strong. Our real action is in our silent
moments. Why should we be awed by the name
of Action 1 'Tis a trick of the senses.1
1 Essays : Spiritual Laws, etc.

334 EMERSON.

Justification by faith has had a savour of anti-
nomianism and indifferency ever since the day when
Saint Paul so emphatically denied that he made void
the law through faith, and said of certain calumniators
that their damnation was just. Emerson was open to
the same charge, and he knew it. In a passage
already quoted, Emerson says good-humouredly that
his wife keeps his philosophy from running to anti-
nomianism. He could not mistake the tendency of
saying that, if you look wider, things are all alike, and
that we are in the grasp of a higher law than our own
will. On that side he only paints over in rainbow
colours the grim doctrine which the High Cal-
vinist and the Materialistic Necessarian hold in
common.

All great minds perceive all things; the only
difference lies in the order in which they shall choose
to place them. Emerson, for good reason of his own,
dwelt most on fate, character, and the unconscious
and hidden sources, but he writes many a page of
vigorous corrective. It is wholesome, he says, to
man to look not at Fate, but the other way; the
practical view is the other. As Mill says of his wish
to disbelieve the doctrine of the formation of character
by circumstances — 'Remembering the wish of Fox
respecting the doctrine of resistance to governments,
that it might never be forgotten by Kings nor remem-
bered by subjects, I said that it would be a blessing
if the doctrine of necessity could be believed by all
quoad the characters of others, and disbelieved in

EMERSON. 335

regard to their own. ' So Emerson knew well enough
that man's consciousness of freedom, action, and
power over outer circumstances might be left to take
care of itself, as the practical view generally can.
The world did not need him to tell it that a man's
fortunes are a part of his character. His task was
the more far-reaching one of drawing them to recog-
nise that love is the important thing, not benevolent *
works ; that only impure men consider life as it is
reflected in events, opinions, and persons ; that they
fail to see the action until it is done, whereas what is
far better worth considering is that its moral element
prse-existed in the actor.

It would be easy to show that Emerson has not
worked out his answers to these eternal enigmas, for
ever reproducing themselves in all ages, in such a
form as to defy the logician's challenge. He never
shrinks from inconsistent propositions. He was
unsystematic on principle. ' He thought that truth
has so many facets that the best we can do is to
notice each in turn, without troubling ourselves
whether they agree.' When we remember the in-
adequateness of human language, the infirmities of
our vision, and all the imperfections of mental ap-
paratus, the wise men will not disdain even partial
glimpses of a scene too vast and intricate to be
comprehended in a single map. To complain that
Emerson is no systematic reasoner is to miss the
secret of most of those who have given powerful
impulses to the spiritual ethics of an age. It is

336 EMEKSON.

not a syllogism that turns the heart towards puri-
fication of life and aim ; it is not the logically
enchained propositions of a smites, but the Hash of
illumination, the indefinable accent, that attracts
masses of men to a new teacher and a high doctrine.
The teasing ergoteur is always right, but he never
leads nor improves nor inspires.

Any one can see how this side of the Emersonian
gospel harmonised with the prepossessions of a new
democracy. Trust, he said, to leading instincts,
not to traditional institutions, nor social ordering, nor
the formulas of books and schools for the formation
of character ; the great force is real and elemental.
In art, Mr. Kuskin has explained the palpable truth
that semi-civilised nations can colour better than we
do, and that an Indian shawl and China vase are
inimitable by us. 'It is their glorious ignorance
of all rules that does it ; the pure and true instincts
have play, and do their work ; and the moment we
begin teaching people any rules about colour, and
make them do this or that, we crush the in-
stinct, generally for ever' {Modem Painters, iii. 91).
Emerson said what comes to the same thing about
morals. The philosophy of democracy, or the
government of a great mixed community by itself,
rests on a similar assumption in politics. The found-
ations of a self -governed society on a great scale
are laid in leading instincts. Emerson was never
tired of saying that we are wiser than we know.
The path of science and of letters is not the way

EMERSON. 337

to nature. What was done in a remote age by
men whose names have resounded far, has no deeper
sense than what you and I do to-day. What food,
or experience, or succour have Olympiads and Con-
sulates for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kanaka
in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the
porter1? When he is in this vein Emerson often
approaches curiously near to Eousseau's memorable
and most potent paradox of 1750, that the sciences
corrupt manners.1

Most men will now agree that when the great
fiery trial came, the Emersonian faith and the
democratic assumption abundantly justified them-
selves. Even Carlyle wrote to Emerson at last
(June 4, 1871) : 'In my occasional explosions against
Anarchy, and my inextinguishable hatred of it, I
privately whisper to myself, "Could any Friedrich
Wilhelm now, or Friedrich, or most perfect Governor
you could hope to realise, guide forward what is
America's essential task at present, faster or more
completely than 'Anarchic America' is now doing?"
Such " Anarchy " has a great deal to say for itself.'

The traits of comparison between Carlyle and
Emerson may be regarded as having been pretty
nearly exhausted for the present, until time has

1 What so good, asks Rousseau, ' as a sweet aud precious
ignorance, the treasure of a pure soul at peace with itself, which
finds all its blessedness in inward retreat, in testifying to itself
its own innocence, and which feels no need of seeking a warped
and hollow happiness in the opinion of other people as to its
enlightenment ? '

VOL. I. Z

338 EMERSON.

changed the point of view. In wit, humour, pathos,
penetration, poetic grandeur, and fervid sublimity of
imagination, Carlyle is the superior beyond measure.
But Emerson is as much his superior in that high and
transparent sanity, which is not further removed from
midsummer madness than it is from a terrene and
grovelling mediocrity. This sanity, among other
things, kept Emerson in line with the ruling tend-
encies of his age, and his teaching brings all the aid
that abstract teaching can, towards the solution of
the moral problems of modern societies. Carlyle chose
to fling himself headlong and blindfold athwart the
great currents of things, against all the forces and
elements that are pushing modern.societies forward.
Beginning in his earlier work with the same faith
as Emerson in leading instincts, he came to dream
that the only leading instinct worth thinking about
is that of self-will, mastery, force, and violent strength.
Emerson was for basing the health of a modern com-
monwealth on the only real strength, and the only
kind of force that can be relied upon, namely, the hon-
est, manly, simple, and emancipated character of the
citizen. This gives to his doctrine a hold and a prize
on the work of the day, and makes him our helper.
Carlyle's perverse reaction had wrecked and stranded
him when the world came to ask him for direction.
In spite of his resplendent genius, he had no direction
to give, and was only able in vague and turbid
torrents of words to hide a shallow and obsolete
lesson. His confession to Emerson, quoted above,

EMERSON. 339

looks as if at last he had found this out for him-
self.

If Emerson stood thus well towards the social and
political drift of events, his teaching was no less har-
moniously related to the new and most memorable drift
of science which set in by his side. It is a miscon-
ception to pretend that he was a precursor of the
Darwinian theory. Evolution, as a possible explana-
tion of the ordering of the universe, is a great deal
older than either Emerson or Darwin. What Darwin
did was to work out in detail and with masses of
minute evidence a definite hypothesis of the specific
conditions under which new forms are evolved.
Emerson, of course, had no definite hypothesis of this
sort, nor did he possess any of the knowledge necessary
to give it value. But it was his good fortune that
some of his strongest propositions harmonise with the
scientific theory of the survival of the fittest in the
struggle for material existence. He connects his ex-
hortation to self-reliance with the law working in nature
for conservation and growth, — to wit, that ' Power is
in nature the essential measure of right,' and that
'Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdom
which cannot help itself.' The same strain is con-
stantly audible. Nature on every side, within us
and without, is for ever throwing out new forms
and fresh varieties of living and thinking. To her
experiments in every region there is no end. Those
succeed which prove to have the best adaptation to
the conditions. Let, therefore, neither society nor

340 EMERSON.

the individual check experiment, originality, and
infinite variation. Such language, we may see, fits
in equally well with democracy in politics and with
evolution in science. If, moreover, modern science
gives more prominence to one conception than
another, it is to that of the natural universe of force
and energy, as One and a Whole. This too is the
great central idea with Emerson, repeated a thousand
times in prose and in verse, and lying at the very
heart of his philosophy. Newton's saying that ' the
world was made at one cast ' delights him. ' The
secret of the world is that its energies are solidaires.'
Nature ' publishes itself in creatures, reaching from
particles and spicula, through transformation -on trans-
formation to the highest symmetries. A little heat,
that is, a little motion, is all that differences the bald
dazzling white and deadly cold poles of the earth
from the prolific tropical climates.' Not only, as
Professor Tyndall says, is Emerson's religious sense
entirely undaunted by the discoveries of science ;
all such discoveries he comprehends and assimilates.
' By Emerson scientific conceptions are continually
transmuted into the finer forms and warmer lines of
an ideal world.'

That these transmutations are often carried by
Emerson to the extent of vain and empty self-mysti-
fications is hard to deny, even for those who have
most sympathy with the general scope of his teaching.
There are pages that to the present writer, at least,
after reasonably diligent meditation, remain mere abra-

EMERSON. 341

cadabra, incomprehensible and worthless. For much
of this in Emerson, the influence of Plato is mainly re-
sponsible, and it may be noted in passing that his
account of Plato (Representative Men) is one of his most
unsatisfactory performances. ' The title of Platonist,'
says Mill, 'belongs by far better right to those who have
been nourished in, and have endeavoured to practise
Plato's mode of investigation, than to those who are
distinguished only by the adoption of certain dog-
matical conclusions, drawn mostly from the least
intelligible of his works.'' Nothing is gained by
concealing that not every part of Emerson's work
will stand the test of the Elenchus, nor bear reduc-
tion into honest and intelligible English.

One remarkable result of Emerson's idealism ought
not to be passed over. 'The visible becomes the
Bestial,' said Carlyle, 'when it rests not on the in-
visible.' To Emerson all rested on the invisible, and
was summed up in terms of the invisible, and hence
the Bestial was almost unknown in his philosophic
scheme. Nay, we may say that some mighty pheno-
mena in our universe were kept studiously absent
from his mind. Here is one of the profoundest
differences between Emerson and most of those who,
on as high an altitude, have pondered the same great
themes. A small trait will serve for illustration. It
was well known in his household that he could not
bear to hear of ailments. 'There is one topic,' he
writes, 'peremptorily forbiddeu to all well-bred, to
all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you

342 EMERSON.

have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have
headache, sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I
beseech you by all angels to hold your peace, and not
pollute the morning, to which all the housemates
bring serene and pleasant thoughts, by corruption and
groans. Come out of the azure. Love the day' —
{Conduct of Life, 159).

If he could not endure these minor perturbations
of the fair and smiling face of daily life, far less did
he willingly think of Death. Of nothing in all the
wide range of universal topics does Emerson say so
little as of that which has lain in sombre mystery at
the very core of most meditations on life, from Job
and Solon down to Bacon and Montaigne. Except in
two beautiful poems, already mentioned, Death is
almost banished from his page. It is not the title or
the subject of one of his essays, only secondarily even
of that on Immortality. Love, Friendship, Prudence,
Heroism, Experience, Manners, Nature, Greatness,
and a score of other matters — but none to show that
he ever sat down to gather into separate and concen-
trated shape his reflections on the terrifying phantom
that has haunted the mind of man from the very
birth of time.

Pascal bade us imagine a number of men in chains
and doomed to death; some of them each day
butchered in sight of the others ; those who remained
watching their own lot in that of their fellows, and
awaiting their turn in anguish and helplessness. Such,
he cried, is the pitiful and desperate condition of

EMERSON. 343

man. But nature has other cruelties more stinging
than death. Mill, himself an optimist, yet declares
the course of natural phenomena to be replete with
everything which, when committed by human beings
is most worthy of abhorrence, so that ' one who en-
deavoured in his actions to imitate the natural course
of things would be universally seen and acknowledged
to be the wickedest of men.' To man himself,
moreover, 'the most criminal actions are not more
unnatural than most of the virtues.' We need not
multiply from poets and divines, from moralists and
sages, these grim pictures. The sombre melancholy,
the savage moral indignation, the passionate intel-
lectual scorn, with which life and the universe have
filled strong souls, some with one emotion and some
with another, were all to Emerson in his habitual
thinking unintelligible and remote. He admits,
indeed, that 'the disease and deformity around us
certify that infraction of natural, intellectual, and
moral laws, and often violation on violation to breed
such compound misery.' The way of Providence, he
says in another place, is a little rude, through
earthquakes, fever, the sword of climate, and a
thousand other hints of ferocity in the interiors of
nature. Providence has a wild rough incalculable
road to its end, and ' it is of no use to try to white-
wash its huge mixed instrumentalities, or to dress
up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white
neckcloth of a student of divinity.' But he only
drew from the thought of these cruelties of the

344 EMEESON.

universe the practical moral that ' our culture must
not omit the arming of the man.' He is born into
the state of war, and will therefore do well to acquire
a military attitude of soul. There is perhaps no
better moral than this of the Stoic, but greater irn-
pressiveness might have marked the lesson, if our
teacher had been more indulgent to the man's sense
of tragedy in that vast drama in which he plays his
piteous part.

In like manner, Emerson has little to say of that
horrid burden and impediment on the soul, which the
churches call Sin, and which, by whatever name we call
it, is a very real catastrophe in the moral nature of
man. He had no eye, like Dante's, for the vilehess, the
cruelty, the utter despicableness to which humanity may
be moulded. If he saw them at all, it was through the
softening and illusive medium of generalised phrases.
Nor was he ever shocked and driven into himself by
' the immoral thoughtlessness ' of men. The courses
of nature, and the prodigious injustices of man in
society, affect him with neither horror nor awe. He
will see no monster if he can help it. For the fatal
Nemesis or terrible Erinnyes, daughters of Erebus
and Night, Emerson substitutes a fair-weather abstrac-
tion named Compensation. One radical tragedy in
nature he admits — ' the distinction of More and Less.'
If I am poor in faculty, dim in vision, shut out from
opportunity, in every sense an outcast from the
inheritance of the earth, that seems indeed to be a
tragedy. ' But see the facts clearly and these moun-

EMERSON. 345

tainous inequalities vanish. Love reduces them, as
the sun melts the iceberg in the sea. The heart and
soul of all men being one, this bitterness of His and
Mine ceases. His is mine.' Surely words, words,
words ! What can be more idle, when one of the
world's bitter puzzles is pressed on the teacher,
than that he should betake himself to an altitude
whence it is not visible, and then assure us that it
is not only invisible, but non-existent ? This is not
to see the facts clearly, but to pour the fumes of
obscuration round them. When he comforts us by
saying 'Love, and you shall be loved,' who does
not recall cases which make the Jean Valjean of
Victor Hugo's noble romance not a figment of the
theatre, but an all too actual type? The believer
who looks to another world to redress the wrongs
and horrors of this ; the sage who warns us that the
law of life is resignation, renunciation, and doing-
without (entbehren sollst du) — each of these has a
foothold in common language. But to say that all
infractions of love and equity are speedily punished —
punished by fear — and then to talk of the perfect
compensation of the universe, is mere playing with
words, for it does not solve the problem in the terms
in which men propound it. Emerson, as we have said,
held the spirit of System in aversion as fettering
the liberal play of thought, just as in morals, with
greater boldness, he rebelled against a minute and
cramping interpretation of Duty. We are not sure
that his own optimistic doctrine did not play him the

346 EMEKSON.

same tyrannical trick, by sealing his eyes to at least
one half of the actualities of nature and the gruesome
possibilities of things. It had no unimportant effect
on Emerson's thought that he was born in a new
world that had cut itself loose from old history. The
black and devious ways through which the race has
marched are not real in North America, as they are
to us in old Europe, who live on the very site of
secular iniquities, are surrounded by monuments of
historic crime, and find present and future entangled,
embittered, inextricably loaded both in blood and in
institutions with desperate inheritances from the past.
There are many topics, and those no mean topics,
on which the best authority is not the moralist by
profession, as Emerson was, but the man of the world.
The world hardens, narrows, desiccates common
natures, but nothing so enriches generous ones.
For knowledge of the heart of man, we must go to
those who were closer to the passions and interests
of actual and varied life than Emerson ever could
have been — to Horace, Montaigne, La Bruyere, Swift,
Moliere, even to Pope. If a hostile critic were to
say that Emerson looked at life too much from the
outside, as the clergyman is apt to do, we should
condemn such a remark as a disparagement, but we
should understand what it is in Emerson that the
critic means. He has not the temperament of the
great humorists, under whatever planet they may
have been born, jovial, mercurial, or saturnine. Even
his revolt against formalism is only a new fashion of

EMEKSON. 347

composure, and sometimes comes dangerously near
to moral dilettantism. The persistent identification
of everything in nature with everything else some-
times bewilders, fatigues, and almost afflicts us.
Though he warns us that our civilisation is not near
its meridian, but as yet only in the cock-crowing and
the morning star, still all ages are much alike with
him: man is always man, 'society never advances,'
and he does almost as little as Carlyle himself to fire
men with faith in social progress as the crown of
wise endeavour. But when all these deductions have
been made and amply allowed for, Emerson remains
among the most persuasive and inspiring of those
who by word and example rebuke our despondency,
purify our sight, awaken us from the deadening
slumbers of convention and conformity, exorcise the
pestering imps of vanity, and lift men up from low
thoughts and sullen moods of helplessness and impiety,

END OF VOL. I.

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